We present SimSpin, a new, public, software framework for generating integral field spectroscopy (IFS) data cubes from N-body/hydrodynamical simulations of galaxies, which can be compared directly with observational datasets. SimSpin provides a consistent method for studying a galaxy's stellar component. It can be used to explore how observationally inferred measurements of kinematics, such as the spin parameter λR, are impacted by the effects of, for example, inclination, seeing conditions, distance, etc. SimSpin is written in R and has been designed to be highly modular, flexible, and extensible. It is already being used by the astrophysics community to generate IFS-like cubes and FITS files for direct comparison of simulations to observations. In this paper, we explain the conceptual framework of SimSpin; how it is implemented in R; and we demonstrate SimSpin's current capabilities, providing as an example a brief investigation of how numerical resolution affects how reliably we can recover the intrinsic stellar kinematics of a simulated galaxy.
@article{arxiv.2003.07641,
title = {SimSpin -- Constructing mock IFS kinematic data cubes},
author = {K. E. Harborne and C. Power and A. S. G. Robotham},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2003.07641},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
14 pages, 10 figures. Accepted for publication in PASA