Prof. Peter Schilke, Invited lecture at VAMCD consortium meeting, Cologne, Germany:
Analyzing the large amounts of spectral data coming from modern instruments such as ALMA is a challenge, and remains a bottleneck in the path from observation to publication. There are two aspects to this: obtaining and providing the required fundamental data (frequencies, line strengths, collision coefficients) of all the species including isotopologues and vibrational satellite states; and having tools to use those to analyze and interpret astrophysical line observations.
In this talk I present XCLASS, which is such a tool that has been developed by me and my group since 1997. It can model complex spectra and even datacubes, provide temperature and column density maps, and give error estimates using MCMC methods, and is thus a major step toward rapid and standardized data analysis.
