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Effect of Systematic Uncertainties on Density and Temperature Estimates in Coronae of Capella

Published version
Peer-reviewed

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Abstract

jats:titleAbstract</jats:title> jats:pWe estimate the coronal density of Capella using the O jats:scvii</jats:sc> and Fe jats:scxvii</jats:sc> line systems in the soft X-ray regime that have been observed over the course of the Chandra mission. Our analysis combines measures of error due to uncertainty in the underlying atomic data with statistical errors in the Chandra data to derive meaningful overall uncertainties on the plasma density of the coronae of Capella. We consider two Bayesian frameworks. First, the so-called pragmatic Bayesian approach considers the atomic data and their uncertainties as fully specified and uncorrectable. The fully Bayesian approach, on the other hand, allows the observed spectral data to update the atomic data and their uncertainties, thereby reducing the overall errors on the inferred parameters. To incorporate atomic data uncertainties, we obtain a set of atomic data replicates, the distribution of which captures their uncertainty. A principal component analysis of these replicates allows us to represent the atomic uncertainty with a lower-dimensional multivariate Gaussian distribution. A jats:italict</jats:italic>-distribution approximation of the uncertainties of a subset of plasma parameters including a priori temperature information, obtained from the temperature-sensitive-only Fe jats:scxvii</jats:sc> spectral line analysis, is carried forward into the density- and temperature-sensitive O jats:scvii</jats:sc> spectral line analysis. Markov Chain Monte Carlo based model fitting is implemented including Multi-step Monte Carlo Gibbs Sampler and Hamiltonian Monte Carlo. Our analysis recovers an isothermally approximated coronal plasma temperature of ≈5 MK and a coronal plasma density of ≈10jats:sup10</jats:sup> cmjats:sup−3</jats:sup>, with uncertainties of 0.1 and 0.2 dex, respectively.</jats:p>

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Keywords

5101 Astronomical Sciences, 51 Physical Sciences

Journal Title

Astrophysical Journal

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

0004-637X
1538-4357

Volume Title

968

Publisher

American Astronomical Society
Sponsorship
Science and Technology Facilities Council (ST/P000665/1)
STFC (ST/T000481/1)