Introducing a real-time interactive GUI tool for visualization of galaxy spectra

Abstract

To aid the understanding of the nonlinear relationship between galaxy properties and predicted spectral energy distributions (SED), we present a new interactive graphical user interface tool pipes_vis based on BAGPIPES. 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 (Leung 2021) and also available for installation through pip install pipes_vis).