The Hidden Geometry of Astrophysical Spectra: Path-Signatures of Line Profiles

Abstract

The morphology of a spectral-line profile contains information beyond scalar summaries of line strength, centroid, width, global asymmetry, or diagnostic line ratios. Broad wings, shoulders, double peaks, secondary components, and composite emission--absorption structures encode how flux is ordered across wavelength but can remain indistinguishable under conventional summaries. We introduce an interpretable geometric representation of line profiles inspired by rough path theory. Each wavelength-sampled profile is mapped to a common systemic rest-frame velocity grid and treated as a trajectory in velocity--flux space, traversed from blue to red. From this path, we define a compact set of low-order descriptors measuring signed velocity--flux area, blue--red imbalance localization, higher-order shape complexity, and emission--absorption ordering. Using synthetic profiles, we show that these descriptors separate morphologies with similar full width at half maximum (FWHM), non-parametric velocity width ($W_{80}$), and low-order moment summaries. We then apply the method to MaNGA integral-field spectroscopy by computing H$α$ descriptors in individual spaxels and clustering them in a low-dimensional feature space. The resulting classes form spatially coherent regions of similar ordered line morphology. Although no external velocity field is supplied to the clustering, stacked spectra within these regions recover coherent large-scale centroid-velocity patterns broadly consistent with the MaNGA reference velocity fields. We release a minimalist MIT-licensed package ${\it spectropath}$, available at \href{https://rafaelsdesouza.com.br/spectropath/}{the project website}.