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.

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