English

Sengi: a small, fast, interactive viewer for spectral outputs from stellar population synthesis models

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics 2021-01-25 v2 Astrophysics of Galaxies

Abstract

We present Sengi, https://christopherlovell.github.io/sengi , an online tool for viewing the spectral outputs of stellar population synthesis (SPS) codes. Typical SPS codes require significant disk space or computing resources to produce spectra for simple stellar populations with arbitrary parameters. This makes it difficult to present their results in an interactive, web-friendly format. Sengi uses Non-negative Matrix Factorisation (NMF) and bilinear interpolation to estimate output spectra for arbitrary values of stellar age and metallicity. The reduced disk requirements and computational expense allows the result to be served as a client-based Javascript application. In this paper we present the method for generating grids of spectra, fitting those grids with NMF, bilinear interpolation across the fitted coefficients, and finally provide estimates of the prediction and interpolation errors.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1911.12713,
  title  = {Sengi: a small, fast, interactive viewer for spectral outputs from stellar population synthesis models},
  author = {Christopher C. Lovell},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1911.12713},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

19 pages, 6 figures, accepted to Astronomy & Computing

R2 v1 2026-06-23T12:30:08.040Z