RadFil: a Python Package for Building and Fitting Radial Profiles for Interstellar Filaments

Abstract

We present RadFil, a publicly available Python package that gives users full control over how to build and fit radial density profiles for interstellar filaments. RadFil builds filament profiles by taking radial cuts across the spine of a filament, thereby preserving the radial structure of the filament across its entire length. Pre-existing spines can be inputted directly into RadFil, or can be computed using the FilFinder package as part of the RadFil workflow. We provide Gaussian and Plummer built-in fitting functions, in addition to a background subtraction estimator, which can be fit to the entire ensemble of radial cuts or an average radial profile for the filament. Users can tweak parameters like the radial cut sampling interval, the background subtraction estimation radii, and the Gaussian/Plummer fitting radii. As a result, RadFil can provide treatment of how the resulting filament properties rely on systematics in the building and fitting process. We walk through the typical RadFil workflow and compare our results to those from an independent radial density profile code obtained using the same data; we find that our results are entirely consistent. RadFil is open source and available on GitHub. We also provide a complete working tutorial of the code available as a Jupyter notebook which users can download and run themselves.

arXiv commentAccepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal

References in corpus (17)

• From filamentary clouds to prestellar cores to the stellar IMF: Initial highlights from the Herschel Gould Belt survey
• Characterizing interstellar filaments with Herschel in IC5146
• The Boston University-Five College Radio Astronomy Observatory Galactic Ring Survey
• The persistent cosmic web and its filamentary structure II: Illustrations
• Hi-GAL, the Herschel infrared Galactic Plane Survey: photometric maps and compact source catalogues. First data release for Inner Milky Way: +68°> l > -70°
• On the nature of star-forming filaments: I. Filament morphologies
• Large-scale filaments associated with Milky Way spiral arms
• The Bones of the Milky Way
• The identification of filaments on far infrared and submillimiter images. Morphology, physical conditions and relation with star formation of filamentary structure
• SEDIGISM: Structure, excitation, and dynamics of the inner Galactic interstellar medium
• The impact of turbulence and magnetic field orientation on star forming filaments
• A multi-scale filament extraction method: getfilaments
• The Skeleton of the Milky Way
• A closer look at the "characteristic" width of molecular cloud filaments
• ${}^{13}\mathrm{CO}$ Filaments in the Taurus Molecular Cloud
• The Onset of Massive Star Formation: The Evolution of Temperature and Density Structure in an Infrared Dark Cloud
• Filamentary flow and magnetic geometry in evolving cluster-forming molecular cloud clumps

Cited by in corpus (27)

• Filamentary Accretion Flows in the Infrared Dark Cloud G14.225-0.506 Revealed by ALMA
• On the Three-Dimensional Structure of Local Molecular Clouds
• Like a spider in its web: a study of the Large Scale Structure around the Coma cluster
• Filament profiles from WISExSCOS galaxies as probes of the impact of environmental effects
• The width of Herschel filaments varies with distance
• ALMA observations of NGC 6334S. II. Subsonic and Transonic Narrow Filaments in a High-mass Star Formation Cloud
• Edge collapse and subsequent longitudinal accretion in Filament S242
• Dissecting the super-critical filaments embedded in the 0.5 pc subsonic region of Barnard 5
• A two-step gravitational cascade for the fragmentation of self-gravitating discs
• Supervised machine learning on Galactic filaments Revealing the filamentary structure of the Galactic interstellar medium
• B-fields And dust in interstelLar fiLAments using Dust POLarization (BALLAD-POL): I. The massive filament G11.11-0.12 observed by SOFIA/HAWC+
• Synthetic Large-Scale Galactic Filaments -- on their Formation, Physical Properties, and Resemblance to Observations
• The Magnetic Field in the Milky Way Filamentary Bone G47
• Multiscale Dynamical Scenario of High-mass Star Formation in an IRDC Filament G34
• ALMA uncovers highly filamentary structure towards the Sgr E region
• ATOMS: ALMA Three-millimeter Observations of Massive Star-forming regions -- VI. On the formation of the "L" type filament in G286.21+0.17
• Distance, magnetic field and kinematics of a filamentary cloud LDN 1157
• Magnetic Field of Molecular Gas Measured with the Velocity Gradient Technique I. Orion A
• Mapping and characterizing magnetic fields in the Rho Ophiuchus-A molecular cloud with SOFIA/HAWC$+$
• Filamentary Hierarchies and Superbubbles I: Characterizing filament properties across a simulated spiral galaxy
• From theory to observation: understanding filamentary flows in high-mass star-forming clusters
• Molecular Clouds Associated with {H \small{II}} regions and Candidates within l = 106.65${}^{\circ }$ to 109.50${}^{\circ }$ and b = $-$1.85${}^{\circ }$ to 0.95${}^{\circ }$
• Investigations of MWISP Filaments. I. Filament Identification and Analysis Algorithms, and Source Catalogue
• The Impact of Expanding HII Regions on Filament G37:Curved Magnetic Field and Multiple Direction Material Flows
• The SARAO MeerKAT Galactic Plane Survey filamentary source catalogue
• The Snake Filament: A study of polarization and kinematics
• Sutra : An integrated framework for identification and characterization of filaments in the interstellar medium