Excited to share the release of my new code cogsworth ( that YOU can use to make seamlessly self-consistent population synthesis and galactic dynamics simulations! The paper is out on arXiv ( but read on here for more details 🥳.

Excited to get started? The online documentation ( includes nearly 20 tutorials, a gallery of quick examples and several in-depth case studies to give you everything you need to become a cogsworth expert in no time😎 Can't wait to see what you do with it!.

cogsworth is built on top of the COSMIC and Gala codes, letting you access any of the awesome features in those packages through cogsworth. I'm so grateful for my wonderful co-authors @spacetimekatie, Mathieu and @adrianprw on this project who made it a joy to work on!.

Speaking of visualisations, tired of interpreting evolutionary tables full of numbers? Use cogsworth to make your life easier and simply dynamically generate a cartoon evolution diagram for any binary in your simulation, and quickly plot it's orbit through the galaxy.

cogsworth also comes equipped and ready to transform intrinsic distributions to observables by applying dust maps, bolometric correction functions and selection functions to your simulations. You can directly produce a CMD of your populations with one simple function!

You can even start a cogsworth simulation based on a hydrodynamical zoom-in simulation, sampling clustered populations and fitting a potential to the galactic mass distribution. We currently support any FIRE-2 or ChaNGa galaxy, here's an example from FIRE m11h!

Want to define your own custom star formation like the plot below? cogsworth supports it! Want to change a myriad of binary physics assumptions? cogsworth has you covered! Curious how your systems evolve in different galactic potentials? cogsworth can tell you!

Where did every supernova in a given galaxy happen? Where are the r-process enrichment sites? cogsworth can not only simulate all of this, but also demonstrate how your results change for different assumptions about star formation, binary physics and the galactic environment!

The core purpose of cogsworth is to make predictions for the positions and kinematics of massive stars and compact objects. Both binary evolution and galactic dynamics strongly affect these parameters - and so they have a lot of constraining potential!

I had a great time developing this with @FloorAstro, we're really hoping it can be useful for the community! Very fun seeing what a random conversation at @FlatironCCA can turn into 😁.

Today's the day to donate to support our awesome summer research program at UW astronomy, any amount counts!.

April fools! 🙃.

More in the paper about how much irradiation a planet might have, the fundamental nature of rats in our Universe and some important conclusions. Use the link above or just go to and type "\rats".

And finally, with the combined artist talent of my co-authors we were able to visualise exactly what some irradiated rats on a nearby planet may look like. Including piRATes and kaRATe masters

Then all you need is a 3-body encounter between an ejected RATTS and a MS-RRAT binary and you can quickly form a RRATRATTS. Here's a demonstration with the parameters above and a RATTS based off UJT-1, all computed with REBOUND.

First we need to form a main sequence star-RRAT binary system, for which we used COSMIC and cogsworth to demonstrate some typical system parameters.

In a new paper today we coin the new acronym RATRATARRATRATTS! We explore how Rotating Radio Transients (RRATs) could come together with Runaway T-Tauri Stars (RATTS) to form a binary RRATRATTS and how irradiated rats could evolve on a planet nearby.

A huge thanks to my co-authors and the organisers of the Kavli Summer Program where we developed this project, it’s been lots of fun!!.