A. M. Groener | Searcharxiv

arXiv2018

The Astropy Project: Building an inclusive, open-science project and status of the v2.0 core package

The Astropy project supports and fosters the development of open-source and openly-developed Python packages that provide commonly-needed functionality to the astronomical community. A key element of the Astropy project is the core package Astropy, which serves as the foundation for more specialized projects and packages. In this article, we provide an overview of the organization of the Astropy project and summarize key features in the core package as of the recent major release, version 2.0. We then describe the project infrastructure designed to facilitate and support development for a broader ecosystem of inter-operable packages. We conclude with a future outlook of planned new features and directions for the broader Astropy project.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2014

Shape Profiles and Orientation Bias for Weak and Strong Lensing Cluster Halos

We study the intrinsic shape and alignment of isodensities of galaxy cluster halos extracted from the MultiDark MDR1 cosmological simulation. We find that the simulated halos, are extremely prolate on small scales, and increasingly spherical on larger ones. Due to this trend, analytical projection along the line of sight produces an overestimate of the concentration index as a decreasing function of radius, which we quantify by using both the intrinsic distribution of 3D concentrations ($c_{200}$) and isodensity shape on weak and strong lensing scales. We find this difference to be $\sim 18\%$ ($\sim 9\%$) for low (medium) mass cluster halos with intrinsically low concentrations ($c_{200}=1-3$), while we find virtually no difference for halos with intrinsically high concentrations. Isodensities are found to be fairly well-aligned throughout the entirety of the radial scale of each halo population. However, major axes of individual halos have been found to deviate by as much as $\sim 30^{\circ}$. We also present a value-added catalog of our analysis results, which we have made publicly available to download.

astro-ph.CO↗