The Population Synthesis Toolkit (PST) Python Library
Pablo Corcho-Caballero, Y. Ascasíbar, Daniel Jiménez-López · The Journal of Open Source Software · 2025
Stellar population synthesis is a crucial methodology in astrophysics, enabling the interpretation of the integrated light of galaxies and stellar clusters.By combining empirical and/or theoretical libraries of the spectral energy distributions emitted by simple stellar populations (SSPs) with star formation history (SFH) and chemical evolution models, population synthesis can help estimate essential properties of galaxies, such as total stellar mass, star formation rate, massweighted age, metallicity, and so on.PST is a Python library that offers a comprehensive and flexible framework for stellar population synthesis.Its main goal is to easily and efficiently compute composite spectra using different galaxy evolution models and SSP libraries.It also incorporates additional effects such as cosmic redshift, dust extinction and attenuation, and computes several observable quantities derived from the spectra, including broadband photometric fluxes and equivalent widths.