HostSub_GP: Precise Galaxy Background Subtraction in Transient Long-slit Spectroscopy with Gaussian Processes

Journal Article · Tue Feb 10 00:00:00 UTC 2026 · Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1088/1538-3873/ae3cc1 · OSTI ID:3025581

Liu, Chang  ^[1]; Miller, Adam A.  ^[1]

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1. Northwestern Univ., Evanston, IL (United States); NSF-Simons AI Inst. for the Sky (SkAI), Chicago, IL (United States)

We present a novel host galaxy subtraction technique in long-slit spectroscopy for extragalactic transients. Unlike classic methods which generally estimate the background using simple interpolation of local galaxy flux in the 2D spectrum, our approach leverages multi-band archival images of the host galaxies to model the background emission from the galaxy in the 2D spectrum. Such imaging encodes the wavelength-dependent galaxy profile along the slit, and is readily accessible through wide-field imaging surveys. We construct a smooth prior for the 2D galaxy profile with a Gaussian process (GP) based on these reference images, and use another GP to model the correlated deviations from the prior in the observed spectrum. This enables accurate inference of the galaxy flux blended with the transient. On synthetic long-slit data of a spiral galaxy extracted from a Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer hyper-spectral cube, the GP method remains robust as long as the host galaxy is spatially resolved and consistently outperforms classic methods. We apply the method to archival Keck spectra of two real transients, SN 2019eix and AT 2019qiz, to further demonstrate how the method uniquely recovers weak spectral features amid strong galaxy contamination, enabling refined constraints on the properties of both transients. We have released the software implementation, HostSub_GP, a scalable toolkit that leverages JAX, with an MIT license.

• Research Organization: Northwestern Univ., Evanston, IL (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Science (SC), Nuclear Physics (NP)
• Grant/Contract Number: SC0025599
• OSTI ID: 3025581
• Journal Information: Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, Journal Name: Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific Journal Issue: 2 Vol. 138; ISSN 1538-3873; ISSN 0004-6280
• Publisher: Astronomical Society of the Pacific (ASP)Copyright Statement
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English