Quick Start: Your First Population

Installation and Data Download

First, make sure POSYDON has been installed on a conda environment. If you have not yet completed this step, please take a look at our installation guide here.

Additionally, POSYDON requires data to be downloaded from Zenodo. For our simple population, we will run 100 binaries at solar metallicity, so we only need the 1 Z☉ dataset, which can be downloaded using the get-posydon-data command in a terminal as follows:

Note

This dataset is 10 GB, so please make sure you have enough disk space available. If you have downloaded the full DR2 dataset using the command get-posydon-data DR2 or simply get-posydon-data, then you should already have the 1 Z☉ dataset and you can skip this step.

get-posydon-data DR2_1Zsun

Getting everything set up

First, create a new working directory for your population:

mkdir my_test_population

Next, set the environmental variables so they reference the directory of your POSYDON installation and POSYDON data download:

%env PATH_TO_POSYDON=/YOUR/POSYDON/PATH/
%env PATH_TO_POSYDON_DATA=/YOUR/POSYDON_DATA/PATH/

Next, create our python script to read in the .ini file and generate a population:

touch my_population.py

Within this file, load up the necessary libraries and create an instance of the PopulationRunner class to handle the population:

from posydon.popsyn.synthetic_population import PopulationRunner

poprun = PopulationRunner('$PATH_TO_POSYDON/posydon/popsyn/population_params_default.ini', verbose=True)
poprun.evolve()

Evolve the population:

python my_population.py

After the population has finished running, you can take a look at the output. More information on how to do this is available here.