Cake Talk by Martin Rey
Ionic emission lines characterised by JWST or MUSE amongst others contain invaluable information on distant galaxies, allowing us to infer their chemical composition, ionisation structure and dynamics. Performing these inferences relies on a detailed account of how the complex interplay between gas thermodynamics, radiative transfer and ionic chemistry in the interstellar medium gives rise to these spectroscopic signatures. Here, I will present new simulations that solve all of these processes in a fully galactic and cosmological environment, strongly extending classical one-zone approaches (e.g. CLOUDY) to robustly predict galaxy emission lines. Analysing the simulated data with observational pipelines, I will show how the inhomogeneous and diverse gas conditions in galaxies affect the inference of their physical properties from spectra.