NPTFit: A Code for Non-Poissonian Template Fitting
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Mishra-Sharma_2017_AJ_153_253.pdf
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Author(s)
Mishra-Sharma, Siddharth
Rodd, Nicholas Llewellyn
Safdi, Benjamin Ryan
Date Issued
May 2017
Journal
The Astronomical Journal
Publisher
IOP Publishing
Citation
Mishra-Sharma, Siddharth, Nicholas L. Rodd, and Benjamin R. Safdi. “NPTFit: A Code Package for Non-Poissonian Template Fitting.” The Astronomical Journal 153, no. 6 (May 19, 2017): 253. © 2017 The American Astronomical Society
Version
Final published version
Abstract
We present NPTFit, an open-source code package, written in Python and Cython, for performing non-Poissonian template fits (NPTFs). The NPTF is a recently developed statistical procedure for characterizing the contribution of unresolved point sources (PSs) to astrophysical data sets. The NPTF was first applied to Fermi gamma-ray data to provide evidence that the excess of ∼GeV gamma-rays observed in the inner regions of the Milky Way likely arises from a population of sub-threshold point sources, and the NPTF has since found additional applications studying sub-threshold extragalactic sources at high Galactic latitudes. The NPTF generalizes traditional astrophysical template fits to allow for the ability to search for populations of unresolved PSs that may follow a given spatial distribution. NPTFit builds upon the framework of the fluctuation analyses developed in X-ray astronomy, thus it likely has applications beyond those demonstrated with gamma-ray data. The NPTFit package utilizes novel computational methods to perform the NPTF efficiently. The code is available at http://github.com/bsafdi/NPTFit and up-to-date and extensive documentation may be found at http://nptfit.readthedocs.io.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Center for Theoretical Physics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-3881/aa6d5f
