Gala invitation to cogsworth

About#

Welcome! You’ve found the documentation for cogsworth, good for you! This is an epic crossover episode of a package in which we bring the worlds of rapid population synthesis and galactic dynamics together and see what happens.

What is it?#

Using cogsworth you can evolve a population of stars using population synthesis, whilst self-consistently integrating their orbits with a galactic potential of your choosing. In this way you can explore the full evolutionary history (both stellar and orbital) of a population of stars and make predictions for present day kinematics and other distributions. We additionally provide tools for transforming the intrinsic populations into observables and for classifying each the nature of each system.

In this documentation you’ll find everything you need to get cogsworth working for you! For the new user, we have instructions for the installation of the package, a quick getting started page and a collection of extensive tutorials. For some simple use cases we have a gallery of examples. Additionally if you’re looking for some more detailed examples we have a series of case studies demonstrating potential science use cases. Finally, we include exhaustive API documentations in the User Guide.

tom wagg headshot

Who wrote it?#

The primary author of cogsworth is Tom Wagg (that face on the left), so if you’re about to file a bug report you know who to blame! I made this package to facilitate my PhD research and can’t wait to see what others use it for. Other authors who have provided critical contributions to the package are my collaborators Katie Breivik, Adrian Price-Whelan and Mathieu Renzo!

Why it is called cogsworth?#

So why is it called cogsworth? Honestly, I just really liked the idea of calling a package some random name without a convoluted acronym (inspired by George). Quite simply cogsworth is:

  1. Fun to say (I sincerely hope you’re saying it to yourself in your best English accent right now)

  2. Sounds moderately English

  3. And (most critically) was available on pip

Many thanks to David Wang for listening to me ramble about my ideas one weekend. And if you really want an acronym I can probably do something about that: COsmic Gala Simulations With ObseRvables for THeoretical predictions - tada we have a back-ronym!