2025-07-24 –, Main Room 4
ScatteringOptics.jl is a Julia package for simulating anisotropic radio wave scattering in the ionized interstellar medium. It leverages Julia’s speed and composability to outperform Python by up to 100× in model computations. The package incorporates phase screen models and integrates with the Bayesian radio interferometric module Comrade.jl. Julia’s high-performance auto-differentiation enables efficient computation and Bayesian inference of complex scattering models.
ScatteringOptics.jl is an advanced astronomy software package in the Julia programming language that enables detailed analysis of the temporal, spatial, and spectral effects of interstellar scintillation in the strong scattering regime. This tool is crucial for modeling and analyzing images of the galactic center’s supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*, and outperforms traditional Python implementations with up to 100 times acceleration in model computations. The package provides a suite of analytic, probabilistic models for phase screen simulations and integrates seamlessly with the Bayesian radio interferometric module Comrade.jl, enabling accurate representation of scattering effects on radio measurements obtained via very long baseline interferometry (VLBI). Julia’s high-performance auto-differentiations (AD) are efficient in handling the computational complexity of scattering models and applying novel Bayesian inference techniques used in the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) imaging process.
The package is publicly available in the Julia software repository and maintained in public GitHub repositories. This work was made possible by grants from the National Science Foundation (AST-1950348 and AST-2034306).
Anna Tartaglia is a first year Astronomy Graduate student at Harvard University and NSF Graduate Research Fellow.