Fitting Narrow Spectral Lines in High-Energy Astrophysics Using Incompatible Gibbs Samplers

摘要

A typical stellar spectra can be formulated as a finite mixture distribution composed of one (or more) continuum terms and a set of emission line terms. In this paper, we discuss the spectral model along with several specially designed MCMC samplers that are constructed as Gibbs samplers but use incompatible conditional distributions. The resulting incompatible Gibbs samplers are used to efficiently fit narrow emission lines in the X-ray spectra. As an illustration, we apply our models, methods, and computational strategies to the X-ray spectrum of the high redshift quasar, PG1634+706.