Undergraduate student Katherine Zine and her faculty advisor, Samir Salim, have recently published a paper examining systematic effects when spectral energy distributions (SEDs) are used to derive the physical properties of galaxies, particularly merged galaxies. In “Systematics in the Spectral Energy Distribution Fitting Parameter Estimation of Composite Galaxies,” published in the Astrophysical Journal, they used archival data to identify 9000 galaxy pairs that could eventually merge. From SED fitting of the combined light of the two galaxies in each pair, Zine and Salim estimated the stellar mass and star formation rates. They concluded that a simple, two-component model can fit the resulting SED of merged galaxies without bias, even if the two galaxies have very different star formation rates and dust properties. Their study made use of the GALEX-SDSS-WISE-Legacy Catalog of galaxy parameters from SED fitting (Salim et al. 2016)
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