This model performs a 3-D to 2-D projection of prolate ellipsoidal shells onto elliptical annuli. The annuli can have varying ellipticities and position angles but must have the same center. The user should extract spectra in a series of annuli. Each spectrum needs three additional keywords (as XFLTnnnn) in the spectrum extension. These should be ``major: x'', ``minor: y'', ``orient: z'' where x, y, z are the semi-major axis, semi-minor axis, and position angle (in degrees), respectively, for the outer boundary of the annulus. (If an oblate model is required then switch the values of major and minor and add ninety degrees to orient.) It is assumed that the inner boundary is specified by the outer boundary of the previous annulus. The lengths can be in any consistent units although for numerical accuracy they should have reasonable values. Optional pairs of extra XFLTnnnn keywords can be used to specify start and end angles for a partial annulus. These have keys angleNl and angleNu so typical keyword values might be ``angle1l: 30.0'' and ``angle1u: 45.0''. These angles should be given relative to the same zero as the position angle.
The user reads in the spectra as separate datagroups and sets model parameters for each datagroup. The model for datagroup J will be the model in the shell whose outer boundary is a prolate ellipsoid of semi-major and semi-minor axes given by the semi-major and semi-minor axes in the XFLT keywords for dataset J. The projct model sums up the appropriate fractions of each ellipsoid model to make the projected spectrum.
For example, suppose we extract spectrum from three elliptical regions defined by (1,0.5,0), (2,1,0), (3,1.5,0). That is the first region is in an ellipse of semi-major axis 1 and semi-minor axis 0.5. The second region is an elliptical annulus whose inner boundary has semi-major axis 1 and semi-minor axes 0.5 and whose outer boundary has semi-major axis 2 and semi-minor axis 1. The third region is defined similarly. The model fit has a temperature of 2 keV for the first datagroup, 3 keV for the second, and 4 keV for the third. The actual model fit to the first dataset has contributions from all three temperatures, the second only from the 3 and 4 keV components, and the third only from the 4 keV component. The weighting is the fraction of the ellipsoidal volume intersected by the elliptical annular cross-section. Thus the normalizations correspond to the emission measure in each ellipsoidal shell.
If multiple observations are to be analyzed, data sets from different observations corresponding to the same annulus should be part of the same data group. For example, given the following 4 data files:
Data sets for obs 1: obs1_an1, obs1_an2
Data sets for obs 2: obs2_an1, obs2_an2
The proper data loading command is:
XSPEC12>data 1:1 obs1_an1 1:2 obs2_an1 2:3 obs1_an2 2:4 obs2_an2
The projct model has 3 (fixed) parameters, which can be used to define the inner ellipse of the region being analyzed. For instance, in the example above we could have only read in spectra for the outer two regions but then set the projct parameters to (1.0,0.5,0.0). This would have allowed us to determine the temperatures and emission measures of the outer two annuli without having to worry about fitting a model to the central region.
| par1 | semi-major axis of inner boundary ellipse |
| par2 | semi-minor axis of inner boundary ellipse |
| par3 | position angle of inner boundary ellipse |