EinsteinPy: A Community Python Package for General Relativity
Abstract
This paper presents EinsteinPy (version 0.3), a community-developed Python package for gravitational and relativistic astrophysics. Python is a free, easy to use a high-level programming language which has seen a huge expansion in the number of its users and developers in recent years. Specifically, a lot of recent studies show that the use of Python in Astrophysics and general physics has increased exponentially. We aim to provide a very high level of abstraction, an easy to use interface and pleasing user experience. EinsteinPy is developed keeping in mind the state of a theoretical gravitational physicist with little or no background in computer programming and trying to work in the field of numerical relativity or trying to use simulations in their research. Currently, EinsteinPy supports simulation of time-like and null geodesics and calculates trajectories in different background geometries some of which are Schwarzschild, Kerr, and KerrNewmann along with coordinate inter-conversion pipeline. It has a partially developed pipeline for plotting and visualization with dependencies on libraries like Plotly, matplotlib, etc. One of the unique features of EinsteinPy is a sufficiently developed symbolic tensor manipulation utilities which are a great tool in itself for teaching yourself tensor algebra which for many beginner students can be overwhelmingly tricky. EinsteinPy also provides few utility functions for hypersurface embedding of Schwarzschild spacetime which further will be extended to model gravitational lensing simulation.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2005.11288,
title = {EinsteinPy: A Community Python Package for General Relativity},
author = {Shreyas Bapat and Ritwik Saha and Bhavya Bhatt and Shilpi Jain and Akshita Jain and Sofía Ortín Vela and Priyanshu Khandelwal and Jyotirmaya Shivottam and Jialin Ma and Gim Seng Ng and Pratyush Kerhalkar and Hrishikesh Sudam Sarode and Rishi Sharma and Manvi Gupta and Divya Gupta and Tushar Tyagi and Tanmay Rustagi and Varun Singh and Saurabh Bansal and Naman Tayal and Abhijeet Manhas and Raphael Reyna and Gaurav Kumar and Govind Dixit and Ratin Kumar and Sashank Mishra and Alpesh Jamgade and Raahul Singh and Rohit Sanjay and Khalid Shaikh and Bhavam Vidyarthi and Shamanth R Nayak K and Vineet Gandham and Nimesh Vashistha and Arnav Das and Saurabh and Shreyas Kalvankar and Ganesh Tarone and Atul Mangat and Suyog Garg and Bibek Gautam and Sitara Srinivasan and Aayush Gautam and Swaastick Kumar Singh and Suyash Salampuria and Zac Yauney and Nihar Gupte and Gagan Shenoy and Micky Yun Chan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2005.11288},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
We plan to submit it to A&A. 9 pages