CIGALE means Code Investigating GALaxy Emission. The code has been developed to study the evolution of galaxies by comparing modelled galaxy spectral energy distributions (SEDs) to observed ones from the X-rays and far ultraviolet to the far infra-red and radio. See the Download page to download CIGALE. The git repository is on our Gitlab. If you need any help to use CIGALE, you can contact directly Médéric Boquien and/or Denis Burgarella. You can also use Github for discussions and bug reports if you desire.
CIGALE is a software that extends an older SED fitting algorithm (also named CIGALE) written in FORTRAN by Burgarella et al. (2005) and Noll et al. (2009), which was developed within the framework of the D-SIGALE project led by Guilaine LAGACHE and funded by the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR). The current photometric version of CIGALE is detailed in Boquien et al. (2019), which had benefited from funding by the FONDECYT regular grants 117618 and 1211000 led by Médéric Boquien, ANID BASAL project FB210003, and was supported by the French government through the France 2030 investment plan managed by the National Research Agency (ANR), as part of the Initiative of Excellence of Université Côte d’Azur under reference number ANR-15-IDEX-01 and by the French space agency CNES. The new spectros-photometric version of CIGALE that can use spectrocopic data along with photometric ones is described in Burgarella et al. (2025). We would be glad that you acknowledge our work by listing these references in your paper, if you use CIGALE.
The important X-rays domain has now been added to CIGALE. The initial implementation is described in Yang et al. (2020) with further improvements presented in Yang et al. (2022).
High-quality spectroscopic data on galaxies is now flowing down thanks to several new instruments like JWST/NIRspec, SUBARU/PFS or VLT/MOONS to cite a few projects. CIGALE had to adapt to this strong move by providing CIGALE’s users with the possibility to use pextro-photometric data. This new feature is descibed in Burgarella et al. (2025).
CIGALE has been brought to you by the current and past members of the core team (in alphabetical order): Médéric BOQUIEN (PI), Véronique BUAT, Denis BURGARELLA (PI), Laure CIESLA, Stefan NOLL, Yannick ROEHLLY, and Guang YANG.