Black Hole Physics using Python

Shreyas Bapat — Wed, 20 May 2020 14:56:13 +0000

I was sitting in a guest lecture at my University IIT Mandi about the General Theory of Relativity. Usually, whenever I go to these lectures, I am accompanied by my good friend Bhavya Bhatt. We both stuck at a point where we're not able to visualize what exactly is going on with the Black Hole. I asked Bhavya, "Is there a way to possibly simulate this stuff?". He replied, "Yes, there is. It's called Einstein Toolkit. I've heard that it is difficult to install. But I will still try!". Few days passed by and we met again in the mess. I asked what the progress was, and Bhavya in a sad tone told me that he tried but this software was based on some weird Cactus Thorne Framework.

A month passed and we had nothing. Then we gave up. I mentioned in the last meeting, about creating a Python Package which can make this easy. And then we saw a long radio silence.

After about 3 months, we were again in the same place, getting bored. And definitely had nothing good to do. So we decided that we will start writing the Python Package. We named it EinsteinPy. It was 30 January 2019 when we made the first commit to the repository.

Then it never stopped. Now we have around 200 Stars, which is a big thing for a Scientific Python Package with so focused use case.

We had accepted a student in Google Summer of Code 2020 and ESA Summer of Code in Space 2019.

EinsteinPy is an open-source pure Python package dedicated to problems arising in General Relativity and gravitational physics, such as geodesics plotting for Schwarzschild, Kerr and Kerr Newman space-time model, calculation of Schwarzschild radius, calculation of Event Horizon and Ergosphere for Kerr space-time. Symbolic Manipulations of various tensors like Metric, Riemann, Ricci, Ricci Scalar, Weyl, Schouten, Stress-Energy-Momentum, Einstein, and Christoffel Symbols is also possible using the library. EinsteinPy also features Hypersurface Embedding of Schwarzschild space-time, which will soon lead to the modelling of Gravitational Lensing! It is released under the MIT license.

The code can be seen here: https://github.com/einsteinpy/einsteinpy

The documentation can be seen here: https://docs.einsteinpy.org

DEV Community: Shreyas Bapat

Black Hole Physics using Python