Development#

As seen on the home page, this code is under active development. There are many planned extensions/improvements, so we offer this page to describe them.

Developers#

Active contributors#

name	affiliation
Craig N. Yanitski	Universität zu Köln
Aditi Sinha	Universität zu Köln

Previous contributors#

name	version(s) [1]
Silke Andree-Labsch	(deprecated version)
Christoph Bruckmann	(deprecated version)

Planned development#

Below we list the developments planned for upcoming versions of kosmatau3d.

version	changes
v1.0.8/ v1.0.10	new method in `models.Voxel()` to return species column density should have similar inputs to `models.Voxel.get_abundances()` and `models.constants.voxel_size` for calculation.
v1.0.11	column density method new features will include a voxel size-invariant option that adds the column density of each clump in the ensemble will have beam size and possible filling factor as optional arguments (to mimic the work in §7 of Röllig & Ossenkopf-Okada 2022)
…	…
v1.1.0	restructuring of code `models.masspoints` -> `models.clumps` `models.observations` -> `models.model_data` removal of circular imports
v1.1.x	New features python implementation of the Mathematica routines from Markus Röllig will be placed in `kosmatau3d.kosmatau` should help streamline the processing of the KOSMA-\(\tau\) output and compare to `kosmatau3d` results unify loading of data files to use `pandas` parsing of KOSMA-\(\tau\) grid parameters directly from header should be simple to implement using `pandas` to open the file one should also implement a failsafe to ignore parameters that do not change, since this will cause an error
…	…

Potential development#

The following features have been identified as useful, but currently nobody is implementing them. The maintainers of kosmatau3d are happy to work with anybody who wishes to develop these features.

feature	explanation
cython	From the beginning it was known that compiling the code in cython would dramatically improve its efficiency. The issue with this is that the code needed to be developed before we would understand the most-efficient implementation (you can blame Craig Yanitski for that). Now that the code is mostly working, it should not be too much work to rewrite in cython.
GUI	This existed in the first iteration of KOSMA-\(\tau\) 3D developed by Silke Andree-Labsch (see Andree-Labsch et al. 2017). While it existed to give some order to the series of scripts that existed before implementing an object-orientated approach, it is still a good idea to implement this and give some order to the slew of properties offered by the model. Likewise it should be possible to view an interactive representation of the model as well as compute the synthetic observation.
recursive RT	`radiativeTransfer` is currently functioning by looping through the voxels in a sightline to integrate the radiative transfer equation. This can and should be cleaned-up by rewriting this as a recursive function that can be called for one sightline. It might involve improving the current linear approximation used in the computation (see Yanitski 2023).

References

Andree-Labsch, S., Ossenkopf-Okada, V., & Röllig, M. 2017, Astronomy & Astrophysics, 598, A2

Röllig, M., & Ossenkopf-Okada, V. 2022, Astronomy & Astrophysics, 664, A67

Yanitski 2023, The Milky Way with kosmatau3d: Modelling the Galactic cooling lines using clumpy PDRs, PhD thesis, (Universität zu Köln)

Footnotes