AGAMA: Action-based galaxy modelling architecture

Abstract

AGAMA is a publicly available software library for a broad range of applications in the field of stellar dynamics. It provides methods for computing the gravitational potential of arbitrary analytic density profiles or N-body models, orbit integration and analysis, transformations between position/velocity and action/angle variables, distribution functions expressed in terms of actions and their moments, and iterative construction of self-consistent multicomponent galaxy models. Applications include the inference about the structure of Milky Way or other galaxies from observations of stellar kinematics, preparation of equilibrium initial conditions for N-body simulations, and analysis of snapshots from simulations. The library is written in C++, provides a PYTHON interface, and can be coupled to other stellar-dynamical software: AMUSE, GALPY, and NEMO. It is hosted at http://github.com/GalacticDynamics-Oxford/Agama.