DSPS synthesizes stellar populations, leading to fully-differentiable predictions for galaxy photometry and spectroscopy. The code implements an empirical model for stellar metallicity, and it also supports the Diffstar (ascl:2302.012) model of star formation and dark matter halo history. DSPS rapidly generates and simulates galaxy-halo histories on both CPU and GPU hardware.

Diffstar fits the star formation history (SFH) of galaxies to a smooth parametric model. Diffstar differs from existing SFH models because the parameterization of the model is directly based on basic features of galaxy formation physics, including halo mass assembly history, accretion of gas into the dark matter halo, the fraction of gas that is converted into stars, the time scale over which star formation occurs, and the possibility of rejuvenated star formation. The SFHs of a large number of simulated galaxies can be fit in parallel using mpi4py.

Diffmah approximates the growth of individual halos as a simple power-law function of time, where the power-law index smoothly decreases as the halo transitions from the fast-accretion regime at early times to the slow-accretion regime at late times. The code has a typical accuracy of 0.1 dex for times greater than one billion years in halos of mass greater than 10e11 M_sun. Diffmah self-consistently captures the mean and variance of halo mass accretion rates across long time scales, and it generates Monte Carlo simulations of cosmologically-representative and differentiable halo histories.

The UniverseMachine applies simple empirical models of galaxy formation to dark matter halo merger trees. For each model, it generates an entire mock universe, which it then observes in the same way as the real Universe to calculate a likelihood function. It includes an advanced MCMC algorithm to explore the allowed parameter space of empirical models that are consistent with observations.