A Star-based Method for the Precise Flux Calibration of the Chinese Space Station Telescope Slitless Spectroscopic Survey

Abstract

The upcoming Chinese Space Station Telescope (CSST) slitless spectroscopic survey poses a challenge of flux calibration, which requires a large number of flux-standard stars. In this work, we design an uncertainty-aware residual attention network, the UaRA-net, to derive the CSST spectral energy distributions (SEDs) with a resolution of R = 200 over the wavelength range of 2500–10000 Å using LAMOST normalized spectra with a resolution of R = 2000 over the wavelength range of 4000–7000 Å. With the special structure and training strategy, the proposed model provides accurate predictions not only of SEDs, but also of their corresponding errors. The precision of the predicted SEDs depends on the effective temperature (T eff), wavelength, and the LAMOST spectral signal-to-noise ratios (S/Ns), particularly in the GU band. For stars with T eff = 6000 K, the typical SED precisions in the GU band are 4.2%, 2.1%, and 1.5% at S/N values of 20, 40, and 80, respectively. As T eff increases to 8000 K, the precision increases to 1.2%, 0.6%, and 0.5%, respectively. The precision is higher at redder wavelengths. In the GI band, the typical SED precisions for stars with T eff = 6000 K increase to 0.3%, 0.1%, and 0.1% at S/N values of 20, 40, and 80, respectively. We further verify our model using empirical MILES spectra and find a good performance. The proposed method will open up new possibilities for the optimal use of slitless spectra of the CSST and other surveys.