LZIFU: an emission-line fitting toolkit for integral field spectroscopy data

TL;DR

LZIFU is a versatile IDL toolkit designed for fitting multiple emission lines in integral field spectroscopy data, enabling detailed analysis of gas properties in galaxies with demonstrated accuracy and robustness.

Contribution

The paper introduces LZIFU, a new toolkit for emission-line fitting in IFS data, with detailed methodology, performance evaluation, and application examples, expanding analysis capabilities for galaxy gas properties.

Findings

Accurately fits multiple emission lines with uncertainties.

Successfully applied to CALIFA and SAMI data.

Demonstrates robustness in complex line profiles.

Abstract

We present LZIFU (LaZy-IFU), an IDL toolkit for fitting multiple emission lines simultaneously in integral field spectroscopy (IFS) data. LZIFU is useful for the investigation of the dynamical, physical and chemical properties of gas in galaxies. LZIFU has already been applied to many world-class IFS instruments and large IFS surveys, including the Wide Field Spectrograph, the new Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE), the Calar Alto Legacy Integral Field Area (CALIFA) survey, the Sydney-Australian-astronomical-observatory Multi-object Integral-field spectrograph (SAMI) Galaxy Survey. Here we describe in detail the structure of the toolkit, and how the line fluxes and flux uncertainties are determined, including the possibility of having multiple distinct kinematic components. We quantify the performance of LZIFU, demonstrating its accuracy and robustness. We also show examples of applying LZIFU to CALIFA and SAMI data to construct emission line and kinematic maps, and investigate complex, skewed line profiles presented in IFS data. The code is made available to the astronomy community through github. LZIFU will be further developed over time to other IFS instruments, and to provide even more accurate line and uncertainty estimates.