Welcome to SALSA’s documentation!
The Synthetic Absorption Line Surveyor Application (SALSA)
is an open-source Python module that creates a streamlined process to
generate synthetic absorber catalogs from galactic simulations. Multiple open-source software
projects utilized to achieve this:
accessing simulation data is done using yt,
while Trident is used to generate synthetic
sight lines/light rays and synthetic spectra.
Astropy QTables are used to store data about identified absorbers.
Observational studies generate large absorber catalogs by studying the absorption line spectra of distant quasars. As quasar light passes through intervening galaxies, each galaxy leaves its “imprint” on the quasar spectrum by absorbing some wavelength of light. SALSA can generate similar catalogs from cosmological and galactic simulations, allowing research to study these simulations from an observer’s perspective. This can give new insights into the data as well as help facilitate comparisons and collaboration between simulations and observations
SALSA includes a novel method for extracting absorbers, the SPICE method. This uses
cell-level data to extract absorbers from a Trident LightRay and returns a great
deal of information that can be further analyzed.