A Unified tool to estimate Distances, Ages, and Masses (UniDAM) from spectrophotometric data

Abstract

Galactic archaeology - the study of the formation and evolution of the Milky Way by reconstructing its past from its current constituents - requires precise and accurate knowledge of stellar parameters for as many stars as possible. To achieve this a number of large spectroscopic surveys have been undertaken and are still ongoing. So far consortia carrying out the different spectroscopic surveys have used different tools to determine stellar parameters of stars from their derived effective temperatures (Teff), surface gravities (log g) and metallicities ([Fe/H]) possibly combined with photometric, astrometric, interferometric or asteroseismic information. Here we aim to homogenise the stellar characterisation by applying a unified tool to a large set of publicly available spectrophotometric data. We use spectroscopic data from a variety of large surveys combined with infra-red photometry from 2MASS and AllWISE and compare these in a Bayesian manner with PARSEC isochrones to derive probability density functions (PDFs) for stellar masses, ages and distances. We treat PDFs of pre-helium-core burning, helium-core burning and post helium-core burning solutions as well as different peaks in multi-modal PDFs (i.e. each unimodal sub-PDF) of the different evolutionary phases separately. For over 2.5 million stars we report mass, age and distance estimate for each evolutionary phase and unimodal sub-PDF. We report Gaussian, skewed Gaussian, truncated Gaussian, modified truncated exponential distribution or truncated Student's t-distribution functions to represent each sub-PDF, allowing to reconstruct detailed PDFs. Comparisons with stellar parameter estimates from the literature show good agreement within uncertainties. We present UniDAM - the unified tool applicable to spectrophotometric data of different surveys to obtain a homogenised set of stellar parameters.