The Population Synthesis Toolkit (PST) Python library
Abstract
Stellar population synthesis is a crucial methodology in astrophysics, enabling the interpretation of the integrated light of galaxies and stellar clusters. By combining empirical and/or theoretical libraries of the spectral energy distribution emitted by simple stellar populations (SSPs) with models of the star formation history (SFH) and chemical evolution, population synthesis facilitates the estimation of essential galaxy properties, such as total stellar mass, star formation rate, mass-weighted age and metallicity, etc. The Population Synthesis Toolkit (PST) is a Python library that offers a comprehensive and flexible framework for stellar population synthesis. Its main goal is to compute composite spectra using different galaxy evolution models and SSP libraries with ease and efficiency. It incorporates additional effects, such as cosmic redshift and dust extinction, and it computes several observable quantities derived from the spectra, including broadband photometric fluxes and equivalent widths.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2503.22802,
title = {The Population Synthesis Toolkit (PST) Python library},
author = {Pablo Corcho-Caballero and Yago Ascasibar and Daniel Jiménez-López},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.22802},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
Published in JOSS, 5 pages. Code documentation and tutorials available at https://population-synthesis-toolkit.readthedocs.io