Stellar photoionisation modelling in SYNTHESIZER
Aswin P. Vijayan, Stephen M. Wilkins, Sophie L. Newman, Christopher C. Lovell, William J. Roper, Sabrina Berger, Thomas Harvey, Jack C. Turner
astro-ph.GA
Submitted: 2026-07-29
Comments: 29 pages and 29 figures. Submitted to the Open Journal of Astrophysics
Code: https://github.com/synthesizer-project/syncretize
Project page: https://synthesizer-project.github.io
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: Emission from photoionised gas surrounding young stellar populations (H II regions) provides critical diagnostics of the physical conditions in star forming galaxies.
Terminology
Abstract
Emission from photoionised gas surrounding young stellar populations (H II regions) provides critical diagnostics of the physical conditions in star forming galaxies. This emission constrains the gas properties, the nature of ionising sources, and generates essential features for determining galaxy redshifts. To leverage spectroscopic observations to test galaxy formation models, it is essential to incorporate these emissions into synthetic datasets. Here, we present the integration of photoionised gas emission into the SYNTHESIZER package (https://synthesizer-project.github.io) and demonstrate its application. We quantify the impact of key modelling assumptions - including stellar population synthesis models, initial mass functions, ionisation parameter, gas density, geometry, abundance pattern, elemental depletion, and dust - on spectral diagnostics. Furthermore, we demonstrate the versatility of SYNTHESIZER through its application in different scenarios ranging from exploring emission in toy parametric models to large-volume cosmological simulations with realistic star formation and metal enrichment histories. Taken together, SYNTHESIZER provides a flexible, physically motivated framework to model stellar and nebular emissions, serving as a vital link between theory and observations in the era of next-generation spectroscopic missions.
Sources
- AGN-driven outflows in dwarf galaxies from cosmological simulations: Internal properties and observational signatures
- Origins of Extreme Emission-Line Ratios in z > 3 Galaxies: Insights from the Lumen Model
- First Light And Reionisation Epoch Simulations (FLARES) XII: The consequences of star-dust geometry on galaxies in the EoR
- Understanding the Broad-line Region of Active Galactic Nuclei with Photoionization. I. the Moderate-Accretion Regime
- Nebular_AGN: A CIGALE module for fitting active galactic nucleus emission lines
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