Unsupervised Spectral Unmixing For Telluric Correction Using A Neural Network Autoencoder

The absorption of light by molecules in the atmosphere of Earth is a complication for ground-based observations of astrophysical objects. Comprehensive information on various molecular species is required to correct for this so called telluric absorption. We present a neural network autoencoder approach for extracting a telluric transmission spectrum from a large set of high-precision observed solar spectra from the HARPS-N radial velocity spectrograph. We accomplish this by reducing the data into a compressed representation, which allows us to unveil the underlying solar spectrum and simultaneously uncover the different modes of variation in the observed spectra relating to the absorption of \(\mathrm{H_2O}\) and \(\mathrm{O_2}\) in the atmosphere of Earth. We demonstrate how the extracted components can be used to remove \(\mathrm{H_2O}\) and \(\mathrm{O_2}\) tellurics in a validation observation with similar accuracy and at less computational expense than a synthetic approach with molecfit.