Abstract details

We study the distribution of physical components of galaxies in the wavelength space using subspace methods. We find that it is valid to assume that the stellar and the gaseous components of galaxies span complementary subspaces. To first order, stellar and gaseous spectral features can be extracted from galaxy spectra through a simple matrix multiplication. By a commonality measure which quantifies the projected distance between two given subspaces, we discuss how well the stellar population synthesis models define the SDSS galaxies.