
Gala#
Galactic Dynamics is the study of the formation, history, and evolution of galaxies using the orbits of objects — numerically-integrated trajectories of stars, dark matter particles, star clusters, or galaxies themselves.
gala
is an Astropy-affiliated Python package that aims to provide efficient
tools for performing common tasks needed in Galactic Dynamics research. Much of
this code uses Python for flexible, user-friendly interfaces that interact with
wrappers around low-level code (primarily C) to enable fast computations.
Common operations include gravitational potential and force evaluations, orbit integrations,
dynamical coordinate transformations, and computing
chaos indicators for nonlinear dynamics. gala
heavily uses the units and astronomical coordinate systems defined in the
Astropy core package (astropy.units and
astropy.coordinates).
This package is being actively developed in a public repository on GitHub, and we are always looking for new contributors! No contribution is too small, so if you have any trouble with this code, find a typo, or have requests for new content (tutorials or features), please open an issue on GitHub.
Note
Welcome to the new Gala documentation! The documentation has a new theme and some new content. Use the links in the nav bar above, the page listing below, or the search bar on the left to dive in!
Contributors#
Main author: Adrian Price-Whelan (@adrn)
All contributors (alphabetical last name):
Dan Foreman-Mackey
Nico Garavito-Camargo
Johnny Greco
Akeem Hart
Sergey Koposov
Daniel Lenz
Sophia Lilleengen
Pey Lian Lim
Syrtis Major
Semyeong Oh
Brigitta Sipőcz
Nathaniel Starkman
Tom Wagg
Citation and Attribution#
Here is a list of papers that use Gala
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 also cite the Zenodo DOI of the version you used as a software
citation:
@software{adrian_price_whelan_2020_4159870,
author = {Adrian Price-Whelan and
Brigitta Sipőcz and
Daniel Lenz and
Johnny Greco and
Nathaniel Starkman and
Dan Foreman-Mackey and
P. L. Lim and
Semyeong Oh and
Sergey Koposov and
Syrtis Major},
title = {adrn/gala: v1.3},
month = oct,
year = 2020,
publisher = {Zenodo},
version = {v1.3},
doi = {10.5281/zenodo.4159870},
url = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4159870}
}