Leaves falling in the North
Birds singing in the South
Cigale is reborn
We have just released a new version of Cigale. This release is momentous in the history of Cigale as not only does it come with a massive amount of new features (see hereafter), but it coincides with the acceptance for publication of a new paper in A&A describing the code in exquisite detail. At the same time, reflecting the ever expanding nature of Cigale, with have changed to a year-based versioning scheme. The version will be named after the year and the number of the release in this year. So 2018.0 for this version.
While there are too many new features to list exhaustively, we would like to highlight a few of them:
- It is now possible to indicate the distance in Mpc. This is especially useful for galaxies that are not in the Hubble flow.
- Cigale can not only fit passband fluxes but also intensive (e.g., the UV slope, D4000, equivalent widths, etc.) or extensive physical properties.
- In addition Cigale can now also fit emission lines fluxes (and combinations of emission lines such as Hα+[NII] for instance). This can either be done with corrected or uncorrected absorption lines.
- Conversely Cigale also does a Bayesian analysis to estimate fluxes in passbands, which can be useful when preparing observations for example.
- Various modules have been added. In particular two modules now closely implement flexible versions of the Charlot & Fall (2000) and starbust laws (Calzetti 2000) and we have included the flexible delayed+burst/quench module presented in Ciesla et al. (2017).
- There have been numerous optimisations in particular when running Cigale on multiple cores.
The development of this new version of Cigale was partially supported through grant FONDECYT REGULAR 1170618.