PyTransit: Fast and Easy Exoplanet Transit Modelling in Python

TL;DR

PyTransit is a Python package that provides fast, parallelized, and GPU-accelerated models for exoplanet transit light curve analysis, making it easier to handle large photometric datasets.

Contribution

It introduces an efficient, user-friendly Python interface with optimized transit models, including GPU support, for analyzing extensive exoplanet transit data.

Findings

Supports large datasets with hundreds of thousands of points

Includes GPU acceleration for faster computations

Offers an object-oriented, easy-to-use Python interface

Abstract

We present a fast and user friendly exoplanet transit light curve modelling package PyTransit, implementing optimised versions of the Gimen\'ez and the Mandel & Agol transit models. The package offers an object-oriented Python interface to access the two models implemented natively in Fortran with OpenMP parallelisation. A partial OpenCL version of the quadratic Mandel-Agol model is also included for GPU-accelerated computations. The aim of PyTransit is to facilitate the analysis of photometric time series of exoplanet transits consisting of hundreds of thousands of datapoints, and of multi-passband transit light curves from spectrophotometric observations, as a part of a researcher's programming toolkit for building complex, problem-specific, analyses.