IMAGINE, the Interstellar MAGnetic Field INference Engine, is an open-source (GNU General Public License v3) software designed for analysing the Galactic components with observables. It is a modular framework for doing inference on generic (non)parametric models of the Galaxy. The analysing pipeline works with MPI support and MultiNest sampler.
The Galactic magnetic field (GMF) has a huge impact on the evolution of the Milky Way, yet currently there exists no standard model for it as its structure is not fully understood. In the past many parametric GMF models of varying complexity have been developed that all have been fitted to an individual set of observational data complicating comparability.
We are part of the IMAGINE Consortium, a diverse group of researchers with expertise encompassing the properties of the interstellar medium, Galactic magnetic fields and cosmic rays. Our goal is to systematize parametric inference of Galactic field models. We want to enable a statistical comparison of different models in the future, allow for simple refitting with respect to newly available data sets and thereby increase the research area’s transparency. We aim to make the state-of-art Bayesian methods easily available and in particular to treat the statistics related to the random components of the GMF correctly. The IMAGINE software package is developed and maintained by the technical workgroup of the IMAGINE Consortium.
Please check the documentation for a usage guide and detailed technical information.
bug reports and code contributions are warmly welcomed, feel free to contact