CI: – Dr. Christian Wolf
Astronomers need to a tool that can interactively display, zoom and smooth 1D spectra from a variety of instruments such as the AAT, the ANU 2.3m, Taipan, any ESO telescope. It should be able to show comparison templates of a range of stars, galaxies, quasars and potentially supernovae and more exotic objects. It should allow for line centroid fitting and automatic cross-correlation based redshift estimation. Such a tool needs to accept spectra provided from either FITS files on disk or from links provided in VO tables.
Currently, a well-designed web tool exists in the form of MARZ (developed earlier by now UQ PhD student CI Sam Hinton). However, MARZ has several shortcomings preventing its longer-term use and integration into future web applications. This proposal addresses the shortcomings to create a new tool for the future. We would like to retain almost all the functionality, and add versatility, VO integration, and design it as a freely available tool that a user (e.g. astronomy data centres, or project websites) can integrate into their web environment, while it connects to backend or VO data repositories.
This tool could be used to easily display and analyse UV-optical-IR spectra of astronomical objects from most relevant modern telescopes including those, which the Australian community is expected to use most in this decade and the next.