ITERA: IDL Tool for Emission-line Ratio Analysis

TL;DR

ITERA is a new IDL software tool that simplifies the comparison of observed emission line ratios with theoretical photoionization and shock models, aiding astronomers in spectral analysis.

Contribution

The paper introduces ITERA, a novel IDL-based tool with model libraries for emission line ratio analysis, enhancing comparison and visualization capabilities.

Findings

Provides a user-friendly interface for emission line ratio comparison.

Includes libraries of standard photoionization and shock models.

Demonstrates capabilities with three example emission line ratio diagrams.

Abstract

We present a new software tool to enable astronomers to easily compare observations of emission line ratios with those determined by photoionization and shock models, ITERA, the IDL Tool for Emission-line Ratio Analysis. This tool can plot ratios of emission lines predicted by models and allows for comparison of observed line ratios against grids of these models selected from model libraries associated with the tool. We provide details of the libraries of standard photoionization and shock models available with ITERA, and, in addition, present three example emission line ratio diagrams covering a range of wavelengths to demonstrate the capabilities of ITERA. ITERA, and associated libraries, is available from \url{http://www.brentgroves.net/itera.html}