Statistical Analysis Stack Exchange
Statistical Analysis Stack Exchange

Questions tagged [astronomy]

Astronomy (from Greek: ἀστρονομία) is a natural science that studies celestial objects and phenomena. It applies statistics and other mathematics, physics, and chemistry in an effort to explain the origin of those objects and phenomena and their evolution.

Although in common parlance one uses the term astronomy, in practice, modern astronomy is most frequently astrophysics, and as such is heavily dependent on statistical mechanics and statistics, sometimes with very small $\alpha < 10^{-5}$, e.g., for predicting the existence of exoplanets from orbital modelling of transit data.

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History: the role of statistics in astronomy

I recently boldly claimed in front of a group of fairly smart eighth grade students that astronomy contributed greatly to the foundations of statistics and many statistical concepts were invented for use in astronomy. However, looking to back that…
Rob Hall
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Is a visual estimate of homoscedasticity rigorous enough?

As part of my research in astronomy (quasar magnitudes at various wavelengths), I've been producing graphs such as the following: The bottom plot on each graph shows the distribution of the residuals for the top plot on the graph. I can see that…
Jim421616
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Statistics behind gravitational waves discovery

The recent gravitational waves result is a stunning feat for both physics and engineering. I suspect there may be much to admire on the statistics side as well. For example, the original paper states: Events are assigned a detection-statistic value…
half-pass
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Bayesian inference for probability of finding extra-terrestrial intelligent life as more negative evidence is collected

Consider the problem of estimating the number of discoverable extra-terrestrial civilizations (in our galaxy, say), or the related problem of estimating the probability of discovering such a civilization in some given time frame. The proper way to…
David G. Stork
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Python Astronomy Censored Data in Lifelines

I am trying to find a correlation between a given data set containing redshifts and turnover frequencies (I have a list of 320 galaxies, and the redshift and turnover frequency (a turnover frequency is the frequency of the peak in the radio…
Matt Majic
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Why are there more bayesians than frequentists in astrophysics?

I heard somewhere that in astrophysics, there are more bayesians than frequentists (although in general, I think that bayesian community is smaller). Is there something special about "astro" data what makes it more suitable for bayesian…
sitems
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Which test is better suited to compare averaged versus single data sets

I have a light curve, that is photon count rate versus time, of an astronomical object. These data are periodic since the source signal is periodic. I can fold the data with the period and obtain an average profile. At this point, I want to check…
Py-ser
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How to interpret this scatter plot?

I am simulating a population of binary stars by generating many samples of orbital parameters. I'm investigating the relationship between the inclination of the orbit and the fraction of the acceleration* which is along the line of sight to the…
Sofia Splawska
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Should I use a paired sample t-test to compare two methods of measuring absorption lines?

Background I'm doing a research project in astronomy and measuring equivalent widths of absorption lines using Gaussian fits from a star's spectrum in order to determine the star's chemical abundances. Each absorption line corresponds to a specific…
Evgenii
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Advice to find faint periodic signals in time series data using deep learning methods

We are using few petabytes worth of time series astronomy data. The general aim is to find very faint periodic signals within it. Our current method of processing this data is to do a Fast Fourier transform of the time series and look for peaks in…
Vishnu
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Which is the error of a value corresponding to the maximum of a function?

This is my problem: I use data observed with MUSE (which is an astronomical instrument provides cubes, i.e. an image for each wavelength with a certain range, link ) to extract a measure of redshift. Let's call the MUSE cube with $S_{ij}$, where $i$…
Giuseppe Angora
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Time Series Analysis and Forecasting of Astronomical data having a sinusoidal trend

I have data of an orbital parameter of a satellite for 456 days. I am treating this data as univariate time series data and wish to use time series models to forecast future values. However, this data seems quite complex. This data appears as…
aaliqureshi
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Python Machine Learning: Measuring confidence in individual classifications

I am pretty new to machine learning. I am currently using sci-kit learn's DecisionTreeClassifier and RandomForestClassifier to look at astronomical data. It takes in a number of parameters and tries to classify the source as a supernova remnant,…
ZacharyC
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The probability of photon collision

I was reading a textbook and I couldn't figure out something that seemed really obvious: Assume that the space is uniformly and randomly filled with stars, and the mean radial distance between the stars is l. Photons are emitted from a stars's…
Matina
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Method for fitting censored data in R

I have 320 data points - each has a redshift and a turnover-frequency, and I want to fit a correlation between them (a linear fit). However, 120 of the turnover-frequency values are upper limits. As shown below the relationship is very weak: the…
Matt Majic
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