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arXiv · 2106.01384

PyAutoLens: Open-Source Strong Gravitational Lensing

James. W. Nightingale·Richard G. Hayes·Ashley Kelly·Aristeidis Amvrosiadis·Amy Etherington·Qiuhan He·Nan Li·XiaoYue Cao·Jonathan Frawley·Shaun Cole·Andrea Enia·Carlos S. Frenk·David R. Harvey·Ran Li·Richard J. Massey·Mattia Negrello·Andrew Robertson
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Abstract

Strong gravitational lensing, which can make a background source galaxy appears multiple times due to its light rays being deflected by the mass of one or more foreground lens galaxies, provides astronomers with a powerful tool to study dark matter, cosmology and the most distant Universe. PyAutoLens is an open-source Python 3.6+ package for strong gravitational lensing, with core features including fully automated strong lens modeling of galaxies and galaxy clusters, support for direct imaging and interferometer datasets and comprehensive tools for simulating samples of strong lenses. The API allows users to perform ray-tracing by using analytic light and mass profiles to build strong lens systems. Accompanying PyAutoLens is the autolens workspace (see https://github.com/Jammy2211/autolens_workspace), which includes example scripts, lens datasets and the HowToLens lectures in Jupyter notebook format which introduce non experts to strong lensing using PyAutoLens. Readers can try PyAutoLens right now by going to the introduction Jupyter notebook on Binder (see https://mybinder.org/v2/gh/Jammy2211/autolens_workspace/master) or checkout the readthedocs (see https://pyautolens.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) for a complete overview of PyAutoLens's features.

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James. W. Nightingale, Richard G. Hayes, Ashley Kelly, Aristeidis Amvrosiadis, Amy Etherington, Qiuhan He, Nan Li, XiaoYue Cao, Jonathan Frawley, Shaun Cole, Andrea Enia, Carlos S. Frenk, David R. Harvey, Ran Li, Richard J. Massey, Mattia Negrello, Andrew Robertson. 2021-06-02. PyAutoLens: Open-Source Strong Gravitational Lensing. https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.02825

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