SIMLA: The Spitzer Infrared Spectrograph Mapping Legacy Archive

TL;DR

SIMLA is a comprehensive archive of mid-infrared spectral cubes from Spitzer/IRS, covering diverse astronomical objects, with a novel pipeline ensuring high-quality data suitable for various scientific analyses.

Contribution

The paper introduces the SIMLA archive and a new pipeline for processing and validating mid-infrared spectral cubes from Spitzer/IRS observations.

Findings

Spectral maps for hundreds of objects across various categories.

Synthetic photometry from SIMLA spectra agrees within a few percent with WISE data.

The pipeline effectively removes foregrounds, backgrounds, and detector effects.

Abstract

We present the Spitzer/IRS Mapping Legacy Archive (SIMLA); a complete set of mid-infrared spectral cubes built from low-resolution mapping-mode fixed-target observations from Spitzer/IRS (5.2-38 micron, R~60-130). Contained in this dataset are spectral maps for several hundred spatially-resolved and unresolved objects, including galaxies, molecular clouds, supernova remnants, HII regions, and more. Each cube has been carefully treated to remove astronomical foregrounds and backgrounds as well as detector effects using a novel pipeline. Cube assembly was facilitated by the CUBISM code, which included automatic detection and removal of bad pixels. We describe the SIMLA pipeline for reducing and validating the cubes, and we show that synthetic photometry derived from SIMLA spectra and corresponding WISE photometry typically agree within a few percent. SIMLA products and documentation related to their use will soon be available at the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive (DOI:10.26131/IRSA655).