Trident: Synthetic Spectrum Generator
Connecting simulation to observation
Code Features
Trident is a full-featured tool for the creation of mock absorption spectra and
related data from hydrodynamical simulation outputs.
- Creates absorption-line spectra for any trajectory through a simulated dataset
- Reproduces the spectral characteristics of common instruments like the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph
- Operates across the ultraviolet, optical and infrared using customizable absorption line lists
- Traces simulated physical structures directly to spectral features
- Approximates the presence of ion species absent from the simulation outputs
- Generates column density maps for any ion
- Provides support for all major astrophysical hydrodynamical codes.
- Optionally add a QSO background, Milky Way foreground, or gaussian random noise
- Supports sightlines spannning multiple data outputs across a large redshift range
- Support for spectral output to ASCII, FITS, and HDF5 formats
- Written as an open-source pure Python package
- Fully parallelizable using MPI and MPI4PY
- Built as an extension of the yt analysis code
- For a full description of all features, see our method paper.
Trident in action
Generating synthetic spectra from an astrophysical hydrodynamics simulation from Cameron Hummels on Vimeo.
We use Trident to pass a sightline through a hydrodynamical simulation of a galaxy and build the corresponding absorption spectrum zoomed in on the Si II 1260 Angstrom feature..
On the left, you see a 2D slice of the simulation volume centered on an L* galaxy at z=0.2. On the right, you see the Si II density and line-of-sight velocity of the sightline in the top two panels, and you see the spectrum centered on the Si II 1260 Angstrom feature in the bottom panel. In green is the pure spectrum, whereas the black channel map includes noise (S/N = 10), a QSO background source, and a Milky Way foreground.