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Deriving stellar ages in galaxies its an intricate process that depends on many factors, such as the mathematical recipes of the tools one uses, the adopted stellar libraries and so on. Considering there are many available tools that provide quite different results, I'm trying to understand which tool provides the more accurate results. So, in order to have some clues on the robustness of the different methods, I wanted to see if the derived stellar age of my galaxies follow the Benford's law (BL). Considering that "datasets comprised of numbers that are products of multiple, independent factors will tend to follow BL" I assume that there is no reason for the stellar ages (that go from a few million years to several billion years) not to follow BL (please correct me if I'm wrong). After analyzing the first digits of 436833 derived stellar ages I got a very strange behavior:distribution of 1st numbers in stellar ages for two different methods

The strange behavior is repeated even by using a different stellar library. Any idea what does this means, if it means something at all?

Thanks!

PS - the raw data distribution can be seen here: data distribution

and the log10 of the same here:distribution of the log of the data

faeriewhisper
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  • It can help to look at raw distributions of ages. – mihaild Nov 27 '20 at 18:24
  • thanks @mihaild, ill edit the original post and add it there – faeriewhisper Nov 29 '20 at 12:12
  • So most of numbers you have are about $10^{10}$. There is no reason why such distribution should follow Benford's law. I think it's better to ask physicists why most of the stars are bout 8-10 billions years old (it I understood your plots right). – mihaild Nov 29 '20 at 13:02
  • oh sure!! most of the data is spread within a range of 1 mag only (although at 1st sight looks otherwise) while BL applies to data within several orders of magnitude. thanks for pointing that out! – faeriewhisper Nov 29 '20 at 18:11

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