Well-established areas of astrophysics employing computational methods include magnetohydrodynamics, astrophysical radiative transfer, stellar and galactic dynamics, and astrophysical fluid dynamics. A recently developed field with interesting results is numerical relativity.
Many astrophysicists use computers in their work, and a growing number of astrophysics departments now have research groups specially devoted to computational astrophysics. Important research initiatives include the US Department of Energy (DoE) SciDAC collaboration for astrophysics[1] and the now defunct European AstroSim collaboration.[2] A notable active project is the international Virgo Consortium, which focuses on cosmology.
In August 2015 during the general assembly of the International Astronomical Union a new
commission C.B1 on Computational Astrophysics was inaugurated, therewith recognizing the importance of astronomical discovery by computing.
Computational astrophysics as a field makes extensive use of software and hardware technologies. These systems are often highly specialized and made by dedicated professionals, and so generally find limited popularity in the wider (computational) physics community.
Many codes and software packages, exist along with various researchers and consortia maintaining them. Most codes tend to be
n-body packages or fluid solvers of some sort. Examples of n-body codes include ChaNGa, MODEST,[9] nbodylab.org[10] and Starlab.[11]
For hydrodynamics there is usually a coupling between codes, as the motion of the fluids usually has some other effect (such as gravity, or radiation) in astrophysical situations. For example, for SPH/N-body there is GADGET and SWIFT;[12] for grid-based/N-body RAMSES,[13] ENZO,[14] FLASH,[15] and ART.[16]
AMUSE [2],[17] takes a different approach (called Noah's Ark[18]) than the other packages by providing an interface structure to a large number of publicly available astronomical codes for addressing stellar dynamics, stellar evolution, hydrodynamics and radiative transport.
^Lucio Mayer. Foreword: Advanced Science Letters (ASL), Special Issue on Computational Astrophysics.
^Hamada T., Nitadori K. (2010) 190 TFlops astrophysical N-body simulation on a cluster of GPUs. In Proceedings of the 2010 ACM/IEEE International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC '10). IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA, 1-9. doi:10.1109/SC.2010.1
^Brian W. O'Shea, Greg Bryan, James Bordner, Michael L. Norman, Tom Abel, Robert Harkness, Alexei Kritsuk: "Introducing Enzo, an AMR Cosmology Application". Eds. T. Plewa, T. Linde & V. G. Weirs, Springer Lecture Notes in Computational Science and Engineering, 2004. arXiv:astro-ph/0403044 (Retrieved 20 Nov 2012);
Project pages at:
Astrophysics with a PC: An Introduction to Computational Astrophysics, Paul Hellings. Willmann-Bell; 1st English ed edition.
Practical Astronomy with your Calculator, Peter Duffett-Smith. Cambridge University Press; 3rd edition 1988.
Advanced/graduate level:
Numerical Methods in Astrophysics: An Introduction (Series in Astronomy and Astrophysics): Peter Bodenheimer, Gregory P. Laughlin, Michal Rozyczka, Harold. W Yorke. Taylor & Francis, 2006.
Open cluster membership probability based on K-means clustering algorithm, Mohamed Abd El Aziz & I. M. Selim & A. Essam, Exp Astron., 2016
Automatic Detection of Galaxy Type From Datasets of Galaxies Image Based on Image Retrieval Approach, Mohamed Abd El Aziz, I. M. Selim & Shengwu Xiong Scientific Reports 7, 4463, 2017
