NPTFit: A Code for Non-Poissonian Template Fitting
Author(s)
Mishra-Sharma, Siddharth; Rodd, Nicholas Llewellyn; Safdi, Benjamin Ryan
DownloadMishra-Sharma_2017_AJ_153_253.pdf (1.159Mb)
PUBLISHER_POLICY
Publisher Policy
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
Terms of use
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
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.
Date issued
2017-05Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Center for Theoretical Physics; Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of PhysicsJournal
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
ISSN
1538-3881
0004-6256