GRASIL: a model for the UV to radio SED of galaxies in any evolutionary stage and its applications
GRASIL is a model mostly developed by Laura Silva, Gian Luigi Granato and Alessandro Bressan to compute the spectral evolution from radio to far UV of stellar systems, particularly taking into account dust reprocessing. It can also be used to do 'standard' no-dust spectral synthesis. The original paper is Silva et al 1998. The main features were all already present, but since first determination of the age dependent attenuation of stellar populations, several improvements have been made over the years, mostly using new observations. Recently we have revised the treatment of PAH emission features (Vega et al 2005, Silva et al in preparation) using the data of the ISO and Spitzer space telescopes. GRASIL includes also the computation of nebular line emission (Panuzzo et al 2003). The model has been applied in many papers by our group as well as by independent groups, since it is public. This is testified by the high number of citations of the original 1998 paper (260 according to ADS as of 09/2007), at a rate which still growing now. The model has become a trend setter! grasil2 Recently, we developed a user friendly user interface GALSYNTH, to guide users to run libraries of GRASIL models without installing the code. GRASIL not only fits the observed SED of galaxies, but it also compares galaxy formation models and scenarios with observations (e.g. Granato et al 2000, 2001, 2004, Baugh et al 2005, Lacey et al 2007). In this context we have a long standing collaboration with the Durham-ICC group, with which we have demonstrated that the only way to reproduce the sub-mm galaxy population in the context of standard semi-analytical model is to adopt and extremely top heavy IMF during high-z bursts (Baugh et al 2005). A completely different view was proposed by Granato et al 2004 (qui link alla mia altra scheda) scheda).
Among the many things, we are working at present on advanced methods to interpolate quickly between libraries of GRASIL models, and to include a self consistent treatment of the evolution of dust grains (Schurer et al in preparation).
People: , A. Bressan, A. Petrella, L. Paoletti, D. Selvestrel
Collaboration
Vega et al. (2008), A&A, 484,631; Lacey et al. (2008), MNRAS, 385,1155; Baugh et al. (2007), ASPC, 375,7; Panuzzo et al. (2007), MNRAS, 375,640; Panuzzo et al. (2007), ApJ, 656,206