Gala

The forces on stars, galaxies, and dark matter under external gravitational fields lead to the dynamical evolution of structures in the universe. The orbits of these bodies are therefore key to understanding the formation, history, and future state of galaxies. The field of “galactic dynamics,” which aims to model the gravitating components of galaxies to study their structure and evolution, is now well-established, commonly taught, and frequently used in astronomy. Aside from toy problems and demonstrations, the majority of problems require efficient numerical tools, many of which require the same base code (e.g., for performing numerical orbit integration).

gala is an Astropy-affiliated Python package for galactic dynamics. Python enables wrapping low-level languages (e.g., C) for speed without losing flexibility or ease-of-use in the user-interface. The API for gala was designed to provide a class-based and user-friendly interface to fast (C or Cython-optimized) implementations of common operations such as gravitational potential and force evaluation, orbit integration, dynamical transformations, and chaos indicators for nonlinear dynamics. gala also relies heavily on and interfaces well with the implementations of physical units and astronomical coordinate systems in the Astropy package (astropy.units and astropy.coordinates).

Most of the code in gala centers around implementations of gravitational potentials, numerical integration, and nonlinear dynamics. The package is being actively developed in a public repository on GitHub so if you have any trouble, open an issue there.

How to contribute

We welcome contributions from anyone via pull requests on GitHub. If you don’t feel comfortable modifying or adding functionality, we also welcome feature requests and bug reports as GitHub issues.

Contributors

Main author:

Adrian Price-Whelan (@adrn)

All contributors (alphabetical last name):

  • Johnny Greco

  • Sergey Koposov

  • Daniel Lenz

  • Pey Lian Lim

  • Syrtis Major

  • Semyeong Oh

  • Adrian Price-Whelan

  • Brigitta Sipocz

  • Nathaniel Starkman

Attribution

JOSS DOI

If you make use of this code, please cite the JOSS paper:

@article{gala,
  doi = {10.21105/joss.00388},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.21105%2Fjoss.00388},
  year = 2017,
  month = {oct},
  publisher = {The Open Journal},
  volume = {2},
  number = {18},
  author = {Adrian M. Price-Whelan},
  title = {Gala: A Python package for galactic dynamics},
  journal = {The Journal of Open Source Software}

Please consider also citing the Zenodo DOI DOI as a software citation:

@misc{Price-Whelan:2017,
  author       = {Adrian Price-Whelan and
                  Brigitta Sipocz and
                  Syrtis Major and
                  Semyeong Oh},
  title        = {adrn/gala: v0.2.1},
  month        = jul,
  year         = 2017,
  doi          = {10.5281/zenodo.833339},
  url          = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.833339}
}