News
Papers, data and people.
Browse by species
Click a species to see its shapes, sizes and data files.
Shapes covered
Each species is computed for the same set of morphologies. The size is picked randomly at each page load.
Plot and compare in three steps
Everything runs in the browser, and the Plot page remembers your session when you come back.
Choose the Y-axis
Tick species, shapes and a radius range, then the quantities: extinction, absorption and/or scattering, each with its own line style, on a linear or log scale.
Build your selection
Every curve you tick is kept in a Selected list, where you can rename it, pick its colour and set its line thickness.
Set the X-axis
Choose the unit (µm, nm, Å, cm⁻¹ or eV) and the interval to zoom on, then save the figure as an SVG image.
Before you use the data
A few things that help us, and you.
Cite the right sources
If you use data from this database, please credit the work behind them:
Questions, problems, requests
Something unclear, a curve that looks wrong, or a species you would like to see? Write to the maintainer: we are glad to hear from you, and every report improves the next release.
Good to know
- Every curve carries its provenance: code version, refractive-index source and date.
- Check the units: ASCII files are in m², JSON files in cm²; wavelengths are in m (ASCII) or µm (JSON).
- The data are released under CC BY 4.0: reuse is free as long as you give credit.
Acknowledgments
Summarised from the papers listed in Cite; the full text is in each paper.
This work was supported by the Italian Ministry of University and Research (MUR) through the PRIN project Exo-CASH (PRIN 2022, no. 2022J7ZFRA), and by the Italian Research Center on High Performance Computing, Big Data and Quantum Computing (ICSC), funded by the European Union – NextGenerationEU and the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP), Mission 4 Component 2, within the activities of Spoke 3 “Astrophysics and Cosmos Observations”.
NP_TMcode is the parallel implementation of the T-matrix formalism developed and maintained at the INAF – Astronomical Observatory of Cagliari as a contribution to the activities of ICSC Spoke 3, on the basis of the codes originally written by F. Borghese, P. Denti and R. Saija. It is registered in the Astrophysics Source Code Library (ascl.net/2510.003).
The models were calculated on the computing cluster of the Osservatorio Astronomico di Cagliari, funded by the National Operational Program (PON) of the Italian Ministry of University and Research “Research and Innovation 2014–2020” (Notice D.D. 424 of 02/28/2018, Action II.1, project proposal PIR01_00010). Part of the work was completed at the CINECA GPU Hackathon 2024, part of the Open Hackathons program, with the support of OpenACC-Standard.org.
A. Petralia and G. Aresu acknowledge support from the INAF project 1.05.23.04.02 – MINI-GRANTS (2023) of RSN2 “Modelling of exoplanetary atmospheres in different physical conditions”. M. A. Iatì and F. Saija acknowledge the project “Space It Up” funded by ASI and MUR (Contract n. 2024-5-E.0, CUP I53D24000060005).