Purpose

Conduct principled inference of stellar population properties from photometric and/or spectroscopic data. Prospector allows you to:

• Infer high-dimensional stellar population properties using parametric or highly flexible SFHs (with nested or ensemble Monte Carlo sampling)

• Combine photometric and spectroscopic data from the UV to Far-IR rigorously using a flexible spectroscopic calibration model and forward modeling many aspects of spectroscopic data analysis.

Read the documentation and the code paper.

Installation

See installation for requirements and dependencies. The documentation includes a tutorial and demos.

To install to a conda environment with dependencies, see conda_install.sh. To install just Prospector (stable release):

python -m pip install astro-prospector

To install the latest development version:

cd <install_dir>
git clone https://github.com/bd-j/prospector
cd prospector
python -m pip install .

Then, in Python

import prospect

Citation

If you use this code, please reference this paper:

@ARTICLE{2021ApJS..254...22J,
       author = {{Johnson}, Benjamin D. and {Leja}, Joel and {Conroy}, Charlie and {Speagle}, Joshua S.},
        title = "{Stellar Population Inference with Prospector}",
      journal = {\apjs},
     keywords = {Galaxy evolution, Spectral energy distribution, Astronomy data modeling, 594, 2129, 1859, Astrophysics - Astrophysics of Galaxies, Astrophysics - Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics},
         year = 2021,
        month = jun,
       volume = {254},
       number = {2},
          eid = {22},
        pages = {22},
          doi = {10.3847/1538-4365/abef67},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
       eprint = {2012.01426},
 primaryClass = {astro-ph.GA},
       adsurl = {https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2021ApJS..254...22J},
      adsnote = {Provided by the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System}
}

and make sure to cite the dependencies as listed in installation

Example

Inference with mock broadband data, showing the change in posteriors as the number of photometric bands is increased.