Physical SED Fitting

Using cosmological hydrodynamical simulations as physical prior, we developed a new SED fitting method to estimate physical properties of galaxies.

Using only 5 SDSS optical broadband photometry and spectroscopic redshift as input data, our method can recover the cosmic star formation rate density (Lilly-Madau plot) and stellar mass density (Dickinson plot) with high accuracy. This is a significant improvement over traditional SED fitting methods, which often hard to recover even with much more abundant data.

It is important to note that our method does not depend on simulations being considered the truth (e.g. TNG100). Unlike conventional parametric methods, simulations offer a large set of physically realistic SFH templates. As a result, our approach effectively excludes many physically unrealistic SFHs that are often included in conventional SED fitting methods, which might otherwise yield better fits due to strong degeneracies within the SED. This exclusion of physically unrealistic templates represents a significant advantage of our methodology.

See more information in this paper.