NIRDust: Near Infrared Dust Finder

NIRDust is a python package that uses K-band (2.2 micrometers) spectra to measure the temperature of the dust heated by an Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) accretion disk.

Motivation:

K-band nuclear/circumnuclear spectral continuum of Type 2 AGNs is often composed of two components: the stellar population emission and a hot 700 - 1600 K dust component. If a Reference Spectrum is used to model the stellar emission, the dust component can be fitted by a blackbody function in order to obtain its temperature.

Features

The package provides several functionalities to pre-process spectra and fit the hot dust component of a AGN K-band spectrum with black body functions.

NIRDust needs a minimum of two spectra to run: a target one, where the dust temperature will be determined, and a reference spectrum, where the emission is considered to be purely stellar. The reference spectrum spectrum will be used by NIRDust to model the stellar emission from the target spectrum.

Footnote: the hot dust component may or may not be present in your type 2 nuclei, do not get disappointed if NIRDust finds nothing.

Requeriments

You will need Python 3.8 or higher to run NIRDust.

Installation

You can install the least stable version of NIRDust from pip:

$ pip install nirdust

Or, for the develovepment instalation clone this repository and then inside the local directory execute

$ pip install -e .

Authors: Gaia Gaspar, José Alacoria, Juan B. Cabral & Martin Chalela