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
  • Parametric Star Formation Histories
• 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
  • The Pipeline workflow
  • Setting up a Pipeline object
  • Adding analysis functions
  • Using the Pipeline Object
  • Running the Pipeline
  • Writing out the data
  • Putting it all together
  • Running a subset of observables
  • Hybrid parallelism with MPI
  • Memory-aware chunking
• Parallelism
  • Shared Memory Parallelism (OpenMP)
  • Distributed Memory Parallelism (Pipeline)
• Performance
  • Optimisations
  • Profiling Suite
  • Hardware Specifications
  • Memory Footprint Note
  • Performance Benchmarks
• Advanced
  • Contents
• Cookbook
  • Generate active galaxy
  • Generate composite galaxy
• Examples
  • Cosmological simulation examples
  • Dust examples
  • General examples
  • Grid examples
  • Imaging examples
  • Parametric galaxy examples
  • Particle galaxy examples
• Publications
• API Reference
  • synthesizer

Citation & Acknowledgement

Please cite both of the following papers (Lovell et al. 2025, Roper et al. 2026) if you use Synthesizer in your research:

@article{Lovell2025Synthesizer,
  author = {Lovell, Christopher C. and Roper, William J. and Vijayan, Aswin P. and Wilkins, Stephen M. and Newman, Sophie and Seeyave, Louise},
  journal = {The Open Journal of Astrophysics},
  doi = {10.33232/001c.145766},
  year = {2025},
  month = {oct 9},
  publisher = {Maynooth Academic Publishing},
  title = {Synthesizer: a {Software} {Package} for {Synthetic} {Astronomical} {Observables}},
  volume = {8},
}

@article{Roper2026Synthesizer,
   author = {Roper, Will J. and Lovell, Christopher C. 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 and Punyasheel, Paurush and d'Hautefort, Adrien Aufan Stoffels and Rawlings, Alex},
   journal = {Journal of Open Source Software},
   doi = {10.21105/joss.09436},
   year = {2026},
   publisher = {Open Journals},
   title = {Synthesizer: Synthetic Observables for Modern Astronomy},
   volume = {11},
   number = {119},
   pages = {9436},
}

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.