Synthesizer

Synthesizer is an open-source python package for generating synthetic astrophysical observables. It is modular, flexible, fast and extensible.

This documentation provides a broad overview of the various components in synthesizer and how they interact. The getting started guide contains download and installation instructions, as well as an overview of the code.

For detailed examples of what synthesizer can do, take a look at the examples page. A full description of the code base is provided in the API.

Contents

• Getting Started
  • Installation
  • Overview
  • Downloading Grids
  • Getting Help & Contributing
• Grids
  • Introduction
• Galaxies and Their Components
  • Particle vs Parametric
  • Components
  • The Galaxy Object
• Emissions
  • Emission Objects
  • Emission Type Glossary
  • Generating Emissions
• Emission models
  • Overview
  • Working with EmissionModels
• Instruments
  • Working with Instruments
  • Premade Instruments
  • Filters
• Observables
  • Photometry
  • Spectroscopy
  • Imaging
  • Spectral Data Cubes
• The Pipeline
  • Setting up a Pipeline object
  • Adding analysis functions
  • Running the pipeline
  • Writing out the data
  • Putting it all together
  • Running a subset of observables
  • Hybrid parallelism with MPI
• Performance
  • Parallelism
  • Profiling
• Advanced
  • Contents
• Cookbook
  • Generate active galaxy
  • Generate composite galaxy
• Examples
  • Cosmological simulation examples
  • General examples
  • Grid examples
  • Imaging examples
  • Parametric galaxy examples
  • Particle galaxy examples
• References
• API Reference
  • synthesizer

Citation & Acknowledgement

Please cite both of the following papers (Lovell et al. 2025, Roper et al. 2025) if you use Synthesizer in your research:

@ARTICLE{2025arXiv250803888L,
       author = {{Lovell}, Christopher C. and {Roper}, William J. and {Vijayan}, Aswin P. and {Wilkins}, Stephen M. and {Newman}, Sophie and {Seeyave}, Louise},
        title = "{Synthesizer: a Software Package for Synthetic Astronomical Observables}",
      journal = {arXiv e-prints},
     keywords = {Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics, Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics, Astrophysics of Galaxies},
         year = 2025,
        month = aug,
          eid = {arXiv:2508.03888},
        pages = {arXiv:2508.03888},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
       eprint = {2508.03888},
 primaryClass = {astro-ph.IM},
       adsurl = {https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2025arXiv250803888L},
      adsnote = {Provided by the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System}
}

@ARTICLE{2025arXiv250615811R,
   author = {{Roper}, Will J. and {Lovell}, Christopher and {Vijayan}, Aswin and {Wilkins}, Stephen and {Akins}, Hollis and {Berger}, Sabrina and {Sant Fournier}, Connor and {Harvey}, Thomas and {Iyer}, Kartheik and {Leonardi}, Marco and {Newman}, Sophie and {Pautasso}, Borja and {Perry}, Ashley and {Seeyave}, Louise and {Sommovigo}, Laura},
    title = "{Synthesizer: Synthetic Observables For Modern Astronomy}",
  journal = {arXiv e-prints},
 keywords = {Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics, Astrophysics of Galaxies},
     year = 2025,
    month = jun,
      eid = {arXiv:2506.15811},
    pages = {arXiv:2506.15811},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
       eprint = {2506.15811},
 primaryClass = {astro-ph.IM},
       adsurl = {https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2025arXiv250615811R},
      adsnote = {Provided by the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System}
}

Contributing

Please see here for contribution guidelines.

Primary Contributors

Author:

• Christopher Lovell

• Will Roper

• Aswin Vijayan

• Stephen Wilkins

License

Synthesizer is free software made available under the GNU General Public License v3.0. For details see the LICENSE.