Galaxy properties from J-PAS narrow-band photometry
  We study the consistency of the physical properties of galaxies retrieved
from SED-fitting as a function of spectral resolution and signal-to-noise ratio
(SNR). Using a selection of physically motivated star formation histories, we
set up a control sample of mock galaxy spectra representing observations of the
local universe in high-resolution spectroscopy, and in 56 narrow-band and 5
broad-band photometry. We fit the SEDs at these spectral resolutions and
compute their corresponding the stellar mass, the mass- and luminosity-weighted
age and metallicity, and the dust extinction. We study the biases,
correlations, and degeneracies affecting the retrieved parameters and explore
the r\^ole of the spectral resolution and the SNR in regulating these
degeneracies. We find that narrow-band photometry and spectroscopy yield
similar trends in the physical properties derived, the former being
considerably more precise. Using a galaxy sample from the SDSS, we compare more
realistically the results obtained from high-resolution and narrow-band SEDs
(synthesized from the same SDSS spectra) following the same spectral fitting
procedures. We use results from the literature as a benchmark to our
spectroscopic estimates and show that the prior PDFs, commonly adopted in
parametric methods, may introduce biases not accounted for in a Bayesian
framework. We conclude that narrow-band photometry yields the same trend in the
age-metallicity relation in the literature, provided it is affected by the same
biases as spectroscopy; albeit the precision achieved with the latter is
generally twice as large as with the narrow-band, at SNR values typical of the
different kinds of data.
