2025/11/27 by Viterbo, Giuseppe, Buck, Tobias
Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #Astrophysics and Star Formation Studies #Astrophysics of Galaxies (astro-ph.GA) #FOS: Physical sciences #Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM) #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2511.22468
openalex publication_date 2025/11/27 · openalex created_date 2025/12/03 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We introduce Odisseo (Optimized Differentiable Integrator for Stellar Systems Evolution of Orbits), a differentiable N-body code designed to constrain the gravitational potential of the Milky Way (MW) through dynamical modeling of accreted structures such as stellar streams. Odisseo is implemented in JAX, enabling just-in-time compilation, automatic differentiation, and hardware acceleration on GPUs and TPUs. The code features efficient, fully vectorized force calculations and exhibits near-linear scaling when distributing a single simulation across multiple GPUs, making it suitable for large scale optimization tasks. As a demonstration, we present a case study using a mock GD-1 stellar stream simulation, where we optimize four physical parameters via gradient descent: the accretion time and progenitor mass, as well as the masses of the host Navarro-Frenk-White (NFW) halo and Miyamoto-Nagai (MN) disk. Odisseo accurately recovers stream morphology and underlying parameters in a differentiable and scalable framework, providing a powerful tool for dynamical studies of the Milky Way and its accreted substructures.
StreamSculptor: Hamiltonian Perturbation Theory for Stellar Streams in Flexible Potentials with Differentiable Simulations