LZIFU: an emission-line fitting toolkit for integral field spectroscopy data

• Published in: Astrophysics and Space Science
• Main Authors: Ho, I-Ting, Medling, Anne M., Groves, Brent, Rich, Jeffrey A., Rupke, David S. N., Hampton, Elise, Kewley, Lisa J., Bland-Hawthorn, Joss, Croom, Scott M., Richards, Samuel, Schaefer, Adam L., Sharp, Rob, Sweet, Sarah M.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: Springer 2016
• Subjects: Integral field spectroscopy; Data analysis; Emission line fitting; sami
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10509-016-2865-2

We present lzifu (LaZy-IFU), an idl toolkit for fitting multiple emission lines simultaneously in integral field spectroscopy (IFS) data. lzifu is useful for the investigation of the dynamical, physical and chemical properties of gas in galaxies. lzifu has already been applied to many world-class IFS instruments and large IFS surveys, including the Wide Field Spectrograph, the new Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE), the Calar Alto Legacy Integral Field Area (CALIFA) survey, the Sydney-Australian-astronomical-observatory Multi-object Integral-field spectrograph (SAMI) Galaxy Survey. Here we describe in detail the structure of the toolkit, and how the line fluxes and flux uncertainties are determined, including the possibility of having multiple distinct kinematic components. We quantify the performance of lzifu, demonstrating its accuracy and robustness. We also show examples of applying lzifu to CALIFA and SAMI data to construct emission line and kinematic maps, and investigate complex, skewed line profiles presented in IFS data. The code is made available to the astronomy community through github. lzifu will be further developed over time to other IFS instruments, and to provide even more accurate line and uncertainty estimates. © 2016 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht. Received: 06 April 2016; Accepted: 15 July 2016; First Online: 03 August 2016. We thank the referee for constructive comments that improve the quality of this work. LJK gratefully acknowledges the support of an ARC Future Fellowship, and ARC Discovery Project DP130103925. SMC acknowledges the support of an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (FT100100457). The SAMI Galaxy Survey is based on observations made at the Anglo-Australian Telescope. The Sydney-AAO Multi-object Integral field spectrograph was developed jointly by the University of Sydney and the Australian Astronomical Observatory. The SAMI input catalogue is based on data taken from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the GAMA Survey and the VST ATLAS Survey. The ...