MARTINI: Mock Array Radio Telescope Interferometry of the Neutral ISM

TL;DR

MARTINI is a flexible Python toolkit that simulates realistic 21-cm hydrogen emission observations from galaxy simulations, enabling detailed analysis of the neutral interstellar medium.

Contribution

It introduces a modular, object-oriented framework for generating synthetic radio observations from hydrodynamic galaxy simulations, with customizable sub-modules.

Findings

Provides a flexible, customizable simulation pipeline.

Enables realistic mock observations of atomic hydrogen.

Facilitates comparison between simulations and actual radio data.

Abstract

MARTINI is a modular Python package that takes smoothed-particle hydrodynamics (SPH) simulations of galaxies as input and creates synthetic spatially- and/or spectrally-resolved observations of the 21-cm radio emission line of atomic hydrogen (data cubes). The various aspects of the mock-observing process are divided logically into sub-modules handling the data cube, source galaxy, telescope beam pattern, noise, spectral model and SPH kernel. MARTINI is object-oriented: each sub-module provides a class (or classes) which can be configured as desired. For most sub-modules, base classes are provided to allow for straightforward customization. Instances of each sub-module class are given as parameters to an instance of a main "Martini" class; a mock observation is then constructed by calling a handful of functions to execute the desired steps in the mock-observing process.