Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Binney, James, Wright, Thomas J, Vasiliev, Eugene
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.06512
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866911306184916992
author Binney, James
Wright, Thomas J
Vasiliev, Eugene
author_facet Binney, James
Wright, Thomas J
Vasiliev, Eugene
contents Code is presented that computes and exploits orbital tori for any axisymmetric gravitational potential. The code is a development of the AGAMA software package for action-based galaxy modelling and can be downloaded as the AGAMAb code library. Although coded in C++, most of its functions can be accessed from Python. We add to the package functions that facilitate confronting models with data, which involve sky coordinates, lines of sight, distances, extinction, etc. The new torus generator can produce tori for both highly eccentric and nearly circular orbits that lie beyond the range of the earlier torus-mapping code. Tori can be created by interpolation between tori at very low cost. Tori are fundamentally devices for computing ordinary phase-space coordinates from angle-action coordinates, but AGAMAb includes an action finder that returns angle-action coordinates from any given phase-space location. This action finder yields the torus through the given point, so it includes the functionality of an orbit integrator. The action finder is more accurate and reliable but computationally more costly than the widely used Staeckel Fudge. We show how AGAMAb can be used to generate sophisticated but cheap models of tidal streams and use it to analyse data for the GD1 stream. With the most recently published distances to the stream, energy and angular momentum imply that the end that must be leading is trailing, but extremely small changes to the distances rectify the problem.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_06512
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A New Torus Generator for AGAMA
Binney, James
Wright, Thomas J
Vasiliev, Eugene
Astrophysics of Galaxies
Code is presented that computes and exploits orbital tori for any axisymmetric gravitational potential. The code is a development of the AGAMA software package for action-based galaxy modelling and can be downloaded as the AGAMAb code library. Although coded in C++, most of its functions can be accessed from Python. We add to the package functions that facilitate confronting models with data, which involve sky coordinates, lines of sight, distances, extinction, etc. The new torus generator can produce tori for both highly eccentric and nearly circular orbits that lie beyond the range of the earlier torus-mapping code. Tori can be created by interpolation between tori at very low cost. Tori are fundamentally devices for computing ordinary phase-space coordinates from angle-action coordinates, but AGAMAb includes an action finder that returns angle-action coordinates from any given phase-space location. This action finder yields the torus through the given point, so it includes the functionality of an orbit integrator. The action finder is more accurate and reliable but computationally more costly than the widely used Staeckel Fudge. We show how AGAMAb can be used to generate sophisticated but cheap models of tidal streams and use it to analyse data for the GD1 stream. With the most recently published distances to the stream, energy and angular momentum imply that the end that must be leading is trailing, but extremely small changes to the distances rectify the problem.
title A New Torus Generator for AGAMA
topic Astrophysics of Galaxies
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.06512