Note: Running BASE-9 requires the models.
Bayesian Analysis for Stellar Evolution with Nine Variables (BASE-9) is a Bayesian software suite that recovers star cluster and stellar parameters from photometry. BASE-9 is useful for analyzing single-age, single-metallicity star clusters, binaries, or single stars, and for simulating such systems. BASE-9 uses a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) technique along with bruteforce numerical integration to estimate the posterior probability distribution for the age, metallicity, helium abundance, distance modulus, line-of-sight absorption, and parameters of the initial-final mass relation (IFMR) for a cluster, and for the primary mass, secondary mass (if a binary), and cluster probability for every potential cluster member. The MCMC technique is used for the cluster quantities (first 6 items in the previous list) and numerical integration is used for the stellar quantities (last 3 items in the previous list). BASE-9 is freely available source code that you may use as is or modify for your own research and educational purposes.
BASE-9 may be the code for you if
- you are dissatisfied with deriving cluster-level parameters by over-plotting isochrones on your data and iteratively adjusting parameters,
- you wish to recover more than just an average and error bar for each parameter, and instead wish to characterize the probability distributions for these parameters,
- you wish to take fuller advantage of ancillary data, such as proper motion membership probabilities, spectroscopic mass estimates, or distancesfrom trigonometric parallaxes
We designed BASE-9 to run under a variety of UNIX and Linux operating systems (including Mac OS X). The code is written primarily in the C++ programming language. BASE-9 also takes advantage of parallel computing for the numerical integrations using C++11 threads. You will need g++ (a C++ compiler associated with GCC) version 4.8 or newer or clang++ version 3.2 or newer (available with XCode 4.6), GSL (the Gnu Science Library), cmake (a cross-platform build system) version 2.8.10 or newer, and Boost (a peer-reviewed C++ library) 1.54 or newer to compile the code. To install these software packages, you may need help from your system administrator, though we provide some guidance in the manual. An up-to-date version of the manual is kept on ReadTheDocs here.
Ensure you have installed the prerequisites:
GSL (including development files)
GSL CBLAS
Boost (including development files)
CMake
A C++ compiler (g++ or clang++)
These should be available from your package manager on Linux, or from a third party tool such as Homebrew on OS X. Next, download the BASE-9 archive and unpack it. Descend into the resulting directory and run build.sh as a privileged user or build_local.sh. The project should build and install executables either in /usr/local/bin (for build.sh) or under the current directory in BUILD/bin (for build_local.sh.)