Theory | Steven G. Murray

FORWARD

FORWARD is the name of my Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowship. It’s not an acronym: it is short for “Forward-Models of Cosmic Dawn: connecting 21cm simulations to the real world”. I am performing the fellowship at Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy.

Cosmic Dawn

Cosmic Dawn refers to the time in the Universe’s past when the first stars and galaxies burst into life. We know such a time exists, simply because we know there was a time without stars in the early Universe, and we know there are stars now.

Last updated on Jan 22, 2024 10 min read

21cmFAST

21cmFAST is the premiere semi-numerical 21cm cosmological simulator. It is currently used by every 21cm cosmology experiment to derive predictions of the spatial distribution of 21cm brightness temperature, to compare to observations.

I am a core developer in this project. My role has been primarily to wrap the fast C-code of the original simulator into Python, so that it can be more widely and easily used. This also has the benefit of adding a number of tests so that future development is safer and so that the code can be trusted by its many users.

Last updated on Nov 15, 2022

21cmFAST

21cmFAST is the premiere semi-numerical 21cm cosmological simulator. It is currently used by every 21cm cosmology experiment to derive predictions of the spatial distribution of 21cm brightness temperature, to compare to observations.

I am a core developer in this project. My role has been primarily to wrap the fast C-code of the original simulator into Python, so that it can be more widely and easily used. This also has the benefit of adding a number of tests so that future development is safer and so that the code can be trusted by its many users.

21cmMC

21cmMC uses 21cmFAST to compare observations with theory, and predict astrophysical and cosmological parameters. This is a beast of a process, since it must run thousands of cosmological simulations to generate the predictions. Thus, 21cmMC is highly parallelized with MPI and is geared to run on supercomputers.

21cmMC was originally written by Brad Greig. My primary role has been to integrate it with 21cmFAST v3+, and to improve the interface and extensibility.

Last updated on Nov 15, 2022