Introducing a Real-time Interactive GUI Tool for Visualization of Galaxy Spectra

TL;DR

This paper introduces pipes_vis, an interactive GUI tool based on Bagpipes that allows real-time visualization and manipulation of galaxy properties to better understand their spectral energy distributions, aiding research and education.

Contribution

The paper presents a new real-time interactive GUI tool, pipes_vis, for visualizing galaxy spectra and properties, enhancing understanding and teaching of galaxy SEDs.

Findings

Enables real-time manipulation of galaxy properties and immediate visualization of effects.

Facilitates faster and more intuitive fitting and analysis of galaxy spectra.

Available online for research and educational use.

Abstract

To aid the understanding of the non-linear relationship between galaxy properties and predicted spectral energy distributions (SED), we present a new interactive graphical user interface (GUI) tool pipes_vis based on Bagpipes \citep{arXiv:1712.04452,arXiv:1903.11082}. It allows for real-time manipulation of a model galaxy's star formation history, dust and other relevant properties through sliders and text boxes, with each change's effect on the predicted SED reflected instantaneously. We hope the tool will assist in building intuition about what affects the SED of galaxies, potentially helping to speed up fitting stages such as prior construction, and aid in undergraduate and graduate teaching. pipes_vis is available online (pipes_vis is maintained and documented online at https://github.com/HinLeung622/pipes_vis, or version 0.4.1 is archived in Zenodo and also available for installation through pip install pipes_vis).