Kavli Affiliate: Herman L. Marshall
| First 5 Authors: Herman L. Marshall, Yang Chen, Jeremy J. Drake, Matteo Guainazzi, Vinay L. Kashyap
| Summary:
We describe a process for cross-calibrating the effective areas of X-ray
telescopes that observe common targets. The targets are not assumed to be
"standard candles" in the classic sense, in that we assume that the source
fluxes have well-defined, but {it a priori} unknown values. Using a technique
developed by Chen et al. (2019, arXiv:1711.09429) that involves a statistical
method called {em shrinkage estimation}, we determine effective area
correction factors for each instrument that brings estimated fluxes into the
best agreement, consistent with prior knowledge of their effective areas. We
expand the technique to allow unique priors on systematic uncertainties in
effective areas for each X-ray astronomy instrument and to allow correlations
between effective areas in different energy bands. We demonstrate the method
with several data sets from various X-ray telescopes.
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