Welcome to MoDiSc’s documentation!
MoDiSc is a Python package for debris disk enthusiasts available on GitHub.
MoDiSc (Modeling Disks in Scattered light) is designed to constrain the morphology and photometry of debris disks observed in scattered light.
In a nutshell, the tool MoDiSc takes as input a configuration file setting the paths to the datasets of the observations and defining the variables used in the simulations. By exploring the parameter space with a MCMC algorithm (emcee package from Foreman-Mackey et al. 2013), MoDiSc searches for the disk model that best matches the observations. To initialize the values of the MCMC simulation, a first satisfying guess can be determined by running a Nelder-Mead minimization (Nelder & Mead 1965), which is implemented in MoDiSc.
The disk model can be composed of one or several belts, each of them generated with the module fm.scattered_light_disk from VIP_HCI (Gomez Gonzalez et al. 2017, Christiaens et al. 2023a), based on the radiative transfer code GRaTeR (Augereau et al. 1999b). One or several observations in total and/or polarized intensity can be considered simultaneously, from one or several instruments.
The Figure below shows the best synthetic inner belt model determined by running MCMC simulations with the MoDiSc code (second and third columns). Total and polarized intensity observations (first column) were fitted jointly (see Desgrange et al. 2025).
Origin: I wrote the code MoDiSc based on the code DiskFM (Mazoyer et al. 2020), which I adapted. I wanted a code more versatile than DiskFM, easily launchable for different types of simulations (based on one or several epochs, one or several instruments, modeling one or several belts, using different number free parameters). I did not want to modify everytime the code, but simply give in input a configuration file containing all the information need for the simulation. I also wanted to have the results of the simulations automatically saved in a new folder, with a log of the simulation. I hope the code MoDiSc could be useful for other people too. Feel free to contact me (celia.desgrange@eso.org) if you would like a new feature implemented in MoDiSc for your work.
Check out the Installation and dependencies section to install MoDiSc and the tutorials in Quick start to run MoDiSc to run it on several examples.
Contents
Getting started
Tutorials