Stellar parameters for the first release of the MaStar library: an empirical approach

We report the stellar atmospheric parameters for 7503 spectra contained in the first release of the Mapping Nearby Galaxies at Apache Point Observatory survey (MaNGA) stellar library (MaStar) in Sloan Digital Sky Survey DR15. The first release of MaStar contains 8646 spectra measured from 3321 unique stars, each covering the wavelength range 3622–10354 Å with a resolving power of R ~ 1800. In this work, we first determined the basic stellar parameters: effective temperature (T_eff), surface gravity (log g), and metallicity ([Fe/H]), which best fit the data using an empirical interpolator based on the Medium-resolution Isaac Newton Telescope library of empirical spectra (MILES), as implemented by the University of Lyon Spectroscopic analysis Software package. While we analyzed all 8646 spectra from the first release of MaStar, since MaStar has a wider parameter-space coverage than MILES, not all of these fits are robust. In addition, not all parameter regions covered by MILES yield robust results, likely due to the nonuniform coverage of the parameter space by MILES. We tested the robustness of the method using the MILES spectra itself and identified a proxy based on the local density of the training set. With this proxy, we identified 7503 MaStar spectra with robust fitting results. They cover the range from 3179 to 20,517 K in effective temperature (T_eff), from 0.40 to 5.0 in surface gravity (log g), and from −2.49 to +0.73 in metallicity ([Fe/H]).