Synthesizer: a Software Package for Synthetic Astronomical Observables

TL;DR

Synthesizer is a versatile, modular software platform for generating and analyzing synthetic astrophysical observables, aiding in modeling, testing, and inference in galaxy formation and active galactic nuclei studies.

Contribution

It introduces a flexible, extensible platform with pre-built models for simulating diverse astrophysical observables from various galaxy formation simulations.

Findings

Supports analytical and numerical galaxy models

Enables rapid exploration of parameter spaces

Provides tools for forward and inverse modeling

Abstract

We present Synthesizer, a fast, flexible, modular and extensible platform for modelling synthetic astrophysical observables. Synthesizer can be used for a number of applications, but is predominantly designed for generating mock observables from analytical and numerical galaxy formation simulations. These use cases include (but are not limited to) analytical modelling of the star formation and metal enrichment histories of galaxies, the creation of mock images and integral field unit observations from particle based simulations, detailed photoionisation modelling of the central regions of active galactic nuclei, and spectro-photometric fitting. We provide a number of stellar population synthesis models, photoionisation code configurations, dust models, and imaging configurations that can be used 'out-of-the-box' interactively. The code can be used to quantitatively test the dependence of forward modelled observables on various model and parameter choices, and rapidly explore large parameter ranges for calibration and inference tasks. We invite and encourage the community to use, test and develop the code, and hope that the foundation developed will provide a flexible framework for a number of tasks in forward and inverse modelling of astrophysical observables. The code is publicly available at https://synthesizer-project.github.io/