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V12.8.2 Jul 2014
New features
- The code underlying the NEI models has been rewritten to accommodate the new AtomDB 3.0 files, the beta version of which are included as the default when using any of the NEI models. Older versions can be recovered using xset NEIVERS. The CEI models (apec etc) use some of the same code but there should be no change in their behavior except for a slight speed-up.
- New models:
- agauss – Gaussian model with units in Angstrom and a Gaussian shape in wavelength space.
- nsx – Neutron star non-magnetic atmosphere model from Wynn Ho and collaborators.
- nsmaxg – Neutron star magnetic atmosphere model.
- rnei – NEI recombination model assuming an initial temperature.
- vrnei – rnei with variable abundances for the common elements.
- vvrnei – rnei with variable abundances for all elements (Z <= 30).
- zagauss – The agauss model with a redshift parameter.
- The goodness command has added options fit|nofit. The fit option runs a fit on each simulation before calculating the test statistic.
- The cstat fit statistic can be modified by appending an integer eg. statistic cstat5. In this case the statistic will be evaluated as if the group min N had been used in grppha. This is not as efficient because the rebinning has to be done every statistic evaluation however it is useful for testing using simulations.
- The
model command now checks that parameters are all within a
reasonable order of magnitude (
) of each other, and issues a
warning if they are not.
- Improved the handling of new-best-fit cases when running the error command on parallel processes. The global new-best-fit is now automatically retained. Previously the user was prompted to re-run error in a single process.
- Models can now store (keyword,value) pairs using loadDbValue (C++)or PDBVAL (Fortran). These values can be recovered using the tclout <modkeyval> option. This provides a way to get internal information from the last invocation of a model. There is a manual XSFunctions_guide.pdf in Xspec/src/help describing some of the C++ classes used in the XSFunctions library. This is intended to make it easier to use these classes in other models.
Enhancements previously released as patches to 12.8.1
- PyXspec: added Fit.testStatistic attribute for retrieving the test statistic value from the most recent fit.
- PyXspec: added compiler macros for switching to <Python/Python.h> include paths when building on Mac platforms.
Bug fixes
All bug fixes to v12.8.1 released as patches are included in v12.8.2. In addition the following problems have been corrected:
- Fix for a particular case of non-associative expression evaluation. Models of the form C((M1*A)M2) or C(M1*A)M2, where C is a convolution component, were being wrongly evaluated as (C(M1*A))M2.
- For users with external programs linking to the XSPEC model library, the FNINIT function now properly initializes the AtomDB version to v2.0.2.
- Fix for an ignore command syntax evaluation that was causing a crash on OS X Mavericks.