Published in

Oxford University Press, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 3(490), p. 4080-4106, 2019

DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stz2801

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Astroinformatics based search for globular clusters in the Fornax Deep Survey

This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

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Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the last years, Astroinformatics has become a well-defined paradigm for many fields of Astronomy. In this work, we demonstrate the potential of a multidisciplinary approach to identify globular clusters (GCs) in the Fornax cluster of galaxies taking advantage of multiband photometry produced by the VLT Survey Telescope using automatic self-adaptive methodologies. The data analysed in this work consist of deep, multiband, partially overlapping images centred on the core of the Fornax cluster. In this work, we use a Neural Gas model, a pure clustering machine learning methodology, to approach the GC detection, while a novel feature selection method (ΦLAB) is exploited to perform the parameter space analysis and optimization. We demonstrate that the use of an Astroinformatics-based methodology is able to provide GC samples that are comparable, in terms of purity and completeness with those obtained using single-band HST data and two approaches based, respectively, on a morpho-photometric and a Principal Component Analysis using the same data discussed in this work.