The Astropy Project supports and fosters the development of open-source and openly developed Python packages that provide commonly needed functionality to the astronomical community. A key element of the Astropy Project is the core package astropy, which serves as the foundation for more specialized projects and packages. In this article, we provide an overview of the organization of the Astropy project and summarize key features in the core package, as of the recent major release, version 2.0. We then describe the project infrastructure designed to facilitate and support development for a broader ecosystem of interoperable packages. We conclude with a future outlook of planned new features and directions for the broader Astropy Project.

We propose a novel method to constrain turbulence and bulk motions in massive galaxies, galaxy groups and clusters, exploring both simulations and observations. As emerged in the recent picture of the top-down multiphase condensation, the hot gaseous halos are tightly linked to all other phases in terms of cospatiality and thermodynamics. While hot halos (∼ 10 7 K) are perturbed by subsonic turbulence, warm (∼ 10 4 K) ionized and neutral filaments condense out of the turbulent eddies. The peaks condense into cold molecular clouds (< 100 K) raining in the core via chaotic cold accretion (CCA). We show all phases are tightly linked in terms of the ensemble (wide-aperture) velocity dispersion along the line of sight. The correlation arises in complementary long-term AGN feedback simulations and high-resolution CCA runs, and is corroborated by the combined Hitomi and new Integral Field Unit measurements in Perseus cluster. The ensemble multiphase gas distributions (from UV to radio band) are characterized by substantial spectral line broadening (σ v,los ≈ 100 -200 km s −1 ) with mild line shift. On the other hand, pencil-beam detections (as HI absorption against the AGN backlight) sample the small-scale clouds displaying smaller broadening and significant line shift up to several 100 km s −1 (for those falling toward the AGN), with increased scatter due to the turbulence intermittency. We present new ensemble σ v,los of the warm Hα+[NII] gas in 72 observed cluster/group cores: the constraints are consistent with the simulations and can be used as robust proxies for the turbulent velocities, in particular for the challenging hot plasma (otherwise requiring extremely long X-ray exposures). Finally, we show the physically motivated criterion C ≡ t cool /t eddy ≈ 1 best traces the condensation extent region and presence of multiphase gas in observed clusters and groups. The ensemble method can be applied to many available spectroscopic datasets and can substantially advance our understanding of multiphase halos in light of the next-generation multiwavelength missions.

Supermassive black holes in galaxy centres can grow by the accretion of gas, liberating energy that might regulate star formation on galaxy-wide scales 1-3 . The nature of the gaseous fuel reservoirs that power black hole growth is nevertheless largely unconstrained by observations, and is instead routinely simplified as a smooth, spherical inflow of very hot gas 4 . Recent theory 5-7 and simulations 8-10 instead predict that accretion can be dominated by a stochastic, clumpy distribution of very cold molecular clouds -a departure from the 'hot mode' accretion model -although unambiguous observational support for this prediction remains elusive. Here we report observations that reveal a cold, clumpy accretion flow towards a supermassive black hole fuel reservoir in the nucleus of the Abell 2597 Brightest Cluster Galaxy (BCG), a nearby (redshift z = 0.0821) giant elliptical galaxy surrounded by a dense halo of hot plasma [11][12][13] . Under the right conditions, thermal instabilities can precipitate from this hot gas, producing a rain of cold clouds that fall toward the galaxy's centre 14 , sustaining star formation amid a kiloparsec-scale molecular nebula that inhabits its core 15 . The observations show that these cold clouds also fuel black hole accretion, revealing 'shadows' cast by the molecular clouds as they move inward at about 300 kilometres per second towards the active supermassive black hole in the galaxy centre, which serves as a bright backlight. Corroborating evidence from prior observations 16 of warmer atomic gas at extremely high spatial resolution 17 , along with simple arguments based on geometry and probability, indicate that these clouds are within the innermost hundred parsecs of the black hole, and falling closer towards it. We observed the Abell 2597 Brightest Cluster Galaxy (Fig. 1) with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), enabling us to create a three-dimensional map of both the location and motions of cold gas at uniquely high sensitivity and spatial resolution. The ALMA receivers were sensitive to emission from the J = 2 − 1 rotational line of the carbon monoxide (CO) molecule. CO(2-1) emission is used as a tracer of cold (∼ 10 − 30 K) molecular hydrogen, which is vastly more abundant, but not directly observable at these low temperatures.The continuum-subtracted CO(2-1) images (Fig. 2) reveal that the filamentary emission line nebula that spans the galaxy's innermost ∼ 30 kpc (Fig. 1b) consists not only of warm ionised gas [18][19][20] , but cold molecular gas as well. In projection, the optical emission line nebula is cospatial and morphologically matched with CO(2-1) emission detected at a significance between > ∼ 3σ (in the outer filaments) and > ∼ 20σ (in the nuclear region) above the background noise level. The warm ionised nebula is therefore likely to have a substantial molecular component, consistent with results for other similar galaxies 21 . The total measured CO(2-1) line flux corresponds to a molecular hydrogen gas mass of M H 2 = (1.8 ± 0.2) × 10 9...

Multi-phase filamentary structures around Brightest Cluster Galaxies (BCG) are likely a key step of AGN-feedback. We observed molecular gas in 3 cool cluster cores: Centaurus, Abell S1101, and RXJ1539.5 and gathered ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) and MUSE (Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer) data for 12 other clusters. Those observations show clumpy, massive and long, 3-25 kpc, molecular filaments, preferentially located around the radio bubbles inflated by the AGN (Active Galactic Nucleus). Two objects show nuclear molecular disks. The optical nebula is certainly tracing the warm envelopes of cold molecular filaments. Surprisingly, the radial profile of the Hα/CO flux ratio is roughly constant for most of the objects, suggesting that (i) between 1.2 to 7 times more cold gas could be present and (ii) local processes must be responsible for the excitation. Projected velocities are between 100-400 km s −1 , with disturbed kinematics and sometimes coherent gradients. This is likely due to the mixing in projection of several thin (as yet) unresolved filaments. The velocity fields may be stirred by turbulence induced by bubbles, jets or merger-induced sloshing. Velocity and dispersions are low, below the escape velocity. Cold clouds should eventually fall back and fuel the AGN. We compare the filament's radial extent, r fil , with the region where the X-ray gas can become thermally unstable. The filaments are always inside the low-entropy and short cooling time region, where t cool /t ff <20 (9 of 13 sources). The range t cool /t ff , 8-23 at r fil , is likely due to (i) a more complex gravitational potential affecting the free-fall time t ff (sloshing, mergers. . . ); (ii) the presence of inhomogeneities or uplifted gas in the ICM, affecting the cooling time t cool . For some of the sources, r fil lies where the ratio of the cooling time to the eddy-turnover time, t cool /t eddy , is approximately unity.