EinsteinPy: A Community Python Package for General Relativity

TL;DR

EinsteinPy is an open-source Python package designed for gravitational physics, offering high-level abstractions, geodesic simulations, tensor algebra utilities, and visualization tools to aid researchers and students in general relativity.

Contribution

It introduces a user-friendly Python toolkit with advanced tensor manipulation and simulation capabilities tailored for relativistic astrophysics research and education.

Findings

Supports simulation of geodesics in Schwarzschild, Kerr, and Kerr-Newman geometries

Includes symbolic tensor manipulation utilities for tensor algebra learning

Provides visualization tools for spacetime and gravitational lensing simulations

Abstract

This paper presents EinsteinPy (version 0.3), a community-developed Python package for gravitational and relativistic astrophysics. Python is a free, easy to use a high-level programming language which has seen a huge expansion in the number of its users and developers in recent years. Specifically, a lot of recent studies show that the use of Python in Astrophysics and general physics has increased exponentially. We aim to provide a very high level of abstraction, an easy to use interface and pleasing user experience. EinsteinPy is developed keeping in mind the state of a theoretical gravitational physicist with little or no background in computer programming and trying to work in the field of numerical relativity or trying to use simulations in their research. Currently, EinsteinPy supports simulation of time-like and null geodesics and calculates trajectories in different background geometries some of which are Schwarzschild, Kerr, and KerrNewmann along with coordinate inter-conversion pipeline. It has a partially developed pipeline for plotting and visualization with dependencies on libraries like Plotly, matplotlib, etc. One of the unique features of EinsteinPy is a sufficiently developed symbolic tensor manipulation utilities which are a great tool in itself for teaching yourself tensor algebra which for many beginner students can be overwhelmingly tricky. EinsteinPy also provides few utility functions for hypersurface embedding of Schwarzschild spacetime which further will be extended to model gravitational lensing simulation.