https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/s13360-022-03640-4
Regular Article
Disentropy in astronomy
Laboratory of Quantum Information Technology, Department of Teleinformatic Engineering, DETI/UFC, Federal University of Ceara, C.P. 6007, Campus do Pici, 60455-970, Fortaleza, CE, Brazil
Received:
7
December
2022
Accepted:
28
December
2022
Published online:
13
January
2023
Astronomers often have to deal with randomness. For example, stars and radio telescopes are sources of randomness. On the other hand, randomly distributed stars in some astronomical images can make harder the task of an algorithm that aims the automatic identification of important structures in the image. Therefore, a randomness measure, like the disentropy of the autocorrelation function, can be a useful mathematical tool for astronomers. In this direction, in the present work we firstly show three applications of the disentropy of the autocorrelation in astronomy. Initially, we calculate the randomness of the images of cosmic microwave background maps produced by Planck satellite, providing for the first time a numerical value for that randomness. Following, we use the disentropy to build an algorithm that erases parts of astronomical images with large randomness, what is particularly useful to remove background stars. In the third application, the disentropy of the autocorrelation is used to calculate the randomness of the signal of a radio pulsar used as random number generator. At last, we used the relative disentropy as distance measure between probability distributions in order to find the parameters of the probability density function of the flux density of a pulsar.
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© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Società Italiana di Fisica and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2023. Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
