popkinmocks: mock IFU datacubes for modelling stellar populations and kinematics
- Author(s)
- Prashin Jethwa
- Abstract
Integral Field Units (IFUs) are a type of detector which measure both spatial and spectral
information. These detectors output 3D data-products known as datacubes: 2D images with a
spectrum associated with each image pixel. Beyond the very local Universe where individual
stars can be resolved, IFU datacubes are our most information-rich datasets of galaxies, and
large samples of these have been observed (e.g. Croom et al., 2021). Major results from galaxy
IFU studies include the discovery of the fast versus slow rotator dichotomy (Emsellem et al.,
2011), evidence for inside-out galaxy growth (Pérez et al., 2013), and the ubiquity of warm
orbits across galaxy types (Zhu et al., 2018).
Galaxies are built from stars, gas, dust and dark matter. Stars are an especially useful
observational probe as many physical properties can be inferred from their spectra. Stellar
populations are intrinsic properties such as a star’s age or chemical composition, which affect
the strengths of spectral absorption lines. Stellar kinematics are the positions and velocities of
stars within the galaxy. The component of velocity along the line-of-sight produces Doppler
shifting of absorption lines. In the past, stellar populations and kinematics of external galaxies
have been modelled separately; often thought of as distinct subfields. Recent work has
demonstrated the power of moving beyond this dichotomy to study galaxy evolution (e.g. Poci
et al., 2019). popkinmocks is software to create mock observations of IFU datacubes of galaxy
stellar light for the era of combined population-kinematic analyses.- Organisation(s)
- Department of Astrophysics
- Journal
- Journal of Open Source Software
- Volume
- 8
- No. of pages
- 3
- ISSN
- 2475-9066
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.05225
- Publication date
- 05-2023
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 103004 Astrophysics
- Keywords
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/10511e71-ee1c-4657-94b5-e9556bf84d9a