Spectro-Photometric Version

Large volumes of high-quality spectroscopic data are now becoming available thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope, as well as major ground-based facilities such as SUBARU/PFS and VLT/MOONS. In response to this exciting development, we are releasing a brand-new version of CIGALE.

This release not only preserves the extensive range of physical processes that can be modeled and the exceptional speed inherited from earlier versions, but also introduces a major new feature: the ability to analyze spectroscopic and/or photometric data simultaneously. ore specifically, we would like to highlight the following:

  • Spectroscopic data can be normalized to the available photometric data, if any are provided. To do this, CIGALE integrates the spectrum through the corresponding photometric filters and models the resulting slit correction using polynomials of degree 0, 1, or 2. The optimal degree is then selected via a BIC test. However, caution is warranted when applying this correction, for reasons discussed in the literature—the most obvious being that spectroscopic and photometric observations often probe different regions of a galaxy.
  • Documentation for running the spectro-photometric version of CIGALE is available, together with a sample dataset of galaxies and the corresponding fit results. You can install CIGALE and test it directly on this sample, as all the required files are provided.
  • This version of CIGALE incorporates the new line-emission models of (Theulé et al. 2024). The inclusion of spectral information further improves the estimation of key parameters such as dust attenuation and gas metallicity (see Burgarella et al. 2025).
  • All the features of the standard version of CIGALE remain available. Note, however, that the current spectroscopic implementation is built on the last-but-one CIGALE 2022.1. An update to a more recent base version will be released in the future.

It is recommended to use a recent version of Python, it has been tested with version 3.11.

Download SpectroPhotometric CIGALE

Version 2025.0

After over 2.5 years old development, we are happy to release a brand new version of CIGALE. There are many bug fixes and improvements and optimizations, making it better and faster all around. In particular we would like to highlight the following:

  • The filters have been completely overhauled. They now follow a consistent naming scheme indicating the observatory and instrument (e..g, jwst.nircam.F200W). They also come, for the vast majority of them, from the Filter Profile Service and new filters have been added (e.g. for the Roman and Euclid observatories). The pcigale-filters list command has been greatly improved for clarity, filters being listed by observatory in separate tables. To ease the search of specific filters, strings can be appended to only output filters containing these strings (e.g. pcigale-filters list spitzer wise will only display the filters of these two observatories). Likewise the pcigale-filters plot has been improved and it can now plot different filters on a single plot.
  • It is now possible to use the Charlot & Bruzual (2019) models as well as the BPASS 2.2 models. Note that due to their size, the data files themselves are not provided with the release but can easily be downloaded from the respective websites.
  • The documentation of the pcigale.ini file has been improved for better clarity. Likewise, the information output on the terminal has been clarified and made more explicit and synthetic.
  • The computation of line equivalent widths is now more flexible, allowing to reproduce much more closely how this is done on observed spectra.
  • The cosmology has been updated from WMAP7 to Planck 2018.

It is recommended to use a recent version of Python, it has been tested with version 3.12 and 3.13. However it should also work with older version (at least ≥3.9). As usual it is very strongly recommended to regenerate any pcigale.ini file with this new version.

Download CIGALE 2025.0