lenstronomy is a multi-purpose package to model strong gravitational lenses. The software package is presented in
Birrer & Amara 2018 and is based on Birrer et al 2015.
lenstronomy finds application in e.g. Birrer et al 2016,
Birrer et al 2018 and Shajib et al 2019 for time-delay cosmography and measuring
the expansion rate of the universe and Birrer et al 2017 and Gilman et al. 2019 for
quantifying lensing substructure to infer dark matter properties.
The development is coordinated on GitHub and contributions are welcome.
The documentation of lenstronomy is available at readthedocs.org and
the package is distributed over PyPI.
$ pip install lenstronomy --userTo run lens models with elliptical mass distributions, the fastell4py package, originally from Barkana (fastell), is also required and can be cloned from: https://github.com/sibirrer/fastell4py (needs a fortran compiler)
$ sudo apt-get install gfortran
$ git clone https://github.com/sibirrer/fastell4py.git <desired location>
$ cd <desired location>
$ python setup.py install --userAdditional python libraries are e.g. : numpy, scipy, matplotlib astropy, dynesty, pymultinest, pypolychord, nestcheck, CosmoHammer
- a variety of analytic lens model profiles
- various lensing computation tools (lens equation solver, ray-tracing etc)
- integrated support for multi-lens plane and multi-source plane modelling
- API to conveniently simulate mock lenses
- Extended source reconstruction with basis sets (shapelets)
- numerical options for sub-grid ray-tracing and sub-pixel convolution
- Particle swarm optimization for parameter fitting
- MCMC (emcee) and nested sampling (MultiNest, DyPolyChord, or Dynesty)
- Kinematic modelling (Jeans anisotropy models) of lens deflector galaxy
- Cosmographic inference tools
- ...and much more
The starting guide jupyter notebook
leads through the main modules and design features of lenstronomy. The modular design of lenstronomy allows the
user to directly access a lot of tools and each module can also be used as stand-alone packages.
We have made an extension module available at https://github.com/sibirrer/lenstronomy_extensions. You can find simple examle notebooks for various cases. The latest versions of the notebooks should be compatible with the recent pip version of lenstronomy.
- Units, coordiante system and parameter definitions in lenstronomy
- FITS handling and extracting needed information from the data prior to modeling
- Quadrupoly lensed quasar modelling
- Double lensed quasar modelling
- Time-delay cosmography
- Source reconstruction and deconvolution with Shapelets
- Solving the lens equation
- Measuring cosmic shear with Einstein rings
- Fitting of galaxy light profiles, like e.g. GALFIT
- Quasar-host galaxy decomposition
- Hiding and seeking a single subclump
- Mock generation of realistic images with substructure in the lens
- Mock simulation API with multi color models
- Catalogue data modeling of image positions, flux ratios and time delays
- Example of numerical ray-tracing and convolution options
You can join the lenstronomy mailing list by signing up on the google groups page.
The email list is meant to provide a communication platform between users and developers. You can ask questions, and suggest new features. New releases will be announced via this mailing list.
If you encounter errors or problems with lenstronomy, please let us know!
We provide some examples where a real galaxy has been lensed and then been reconstructed by a shapelet basis set.
- HST quality data with perfect knowledge of the lens model
- HST quality with a clump hidden in the data
- Extremely large telescope quality data with a clump hidden in the data
The design concept of lenstronomy are reported in
Birrer & Amara 2018. Please cite this paper whenever you publish
results that made use of lenstronomy. Please also cite Birrer et al 2015
when you make use of the lenstronomy work-flow or the Shapelet source reconstruction. Please make sure to cite also
the relevant work that was implemented in lenstronomy, as described in the release paper.