pyROX: Rapid Opacity X-sections

Abstract

In recent years, significant advances have been made in exoplanet and brown dwarf observations. By using state-of-the-art models, astronomers can determine properties of their atmospheres, such as temperatures, the presence of clouds, or the chemical abundances of molecules and atoms. Accurate and up-to-date opacities are crucial to avoid inconclusive or biased results, but it can be challenging to compute opacity cross-sections from the line lists provided by various online databases. We introduce pyROX, an easy-to-use Python package to calculate molecular and atomic cross-sections. Since pyROX works on CPUs, it can compute a small line list on a regular workstation, but it is also easily parallelised on a cluster for larger line lists. In addition to line opacities, pyROX also supports calculations of collision-induced absorption. Tutorials are provided in the online documentation which explain the configuration parameters and different functionalities of pyROX.

arXiv comment4 pages. Submitted to the Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS)