Estimating stellar population and emission line properties in S-PLUS galaxies

Abstract

We present tests of a new method to simultaneously estimate stellar population and emission line (EL) properties of galaxies out of S-PLUS photometry. The technique uses the a l starcode, updated with an empirical prior which greatly improves its ability to estimate ELs using only the survey’s 12 bands. The tests compare the output of (noise-perturbed) synthetic photometry of SDSS galaxies to properties derived from previous full spectral fitting and detailed EL analysis. For realistic signal-to-noise ratios, stellar population properties are recovered to better than 0.2 dex in masses, mean ages, metallicities and ±0.2 mag for the extinction. More importantly, ELs are recovered remarkably well for a photometric survey. We obtain input − output dispersions of 0.05–0.2 dex for the equivalent widths of [O ii], [O iii], Hβ, Hα, [N ii], and [S ii], and even better for lines stronger than ∼5 Å. These excellent results are achieved by combining two empirical facts into a prior which restricts the EL space available for the fits: (1) Because, for the redshifts explored here, Hα and [N ii] fall in a single narrow band (J0660), their combined equivalent width is always well recovered, even when [N ii]/Hα is not. (2) We know from SDSS that $W_{\mathrm{H}\alpha +[\rm{N}\, \small {II}] }$ correlates with [N ii]/Hα, which can be used to tell if a galaxy belongs to the left or right wings in the classical BPT diagnostic diagram. Example applications to integrated light and spatially resolved data are also presented, including a comparison with independent results obtained with MUSE-based integral field spectroscopy.