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.

In recent years, a number of alternative theories of gravity have been proposed as possible resolutions of certain cosmological problems or as toy models for possible but heretofore unobserved effects. However, the implications of such theories for the stability of structures such as stars have not been fully investigated. We use our ''generalized variational principle,'' described in a previous work [M. D. Seifert and R. M. Wald, Phys. Rev. D 75, 084029 (2007)], to analyze the stability of static spherically symmetric solutions to spherically symmetric perturbations in three such alternative theories: Carroll et al.'s fR gravity, Jacobson and Mattingly's ''Einstein-aether theory,'' and Bekenstein's TeVeS theory. We find that in the presence of matter, fR gravity is highly unstable; that the stability conditions for spherically symmetric curved vacuum Einstein-aether backgrounds are the same as those for linearized stability about flat spacetime, with one exceptional case; and that the ''kinetic terms'' of vacuum TeVeS theory are indefinite in a curved background, leading to an instability.

We present a general method for the analysis of the stability of static, spherically symmetric solutions to spherically symmetric perturbations in an arbitrary diffeomorphism covariant Lagrangian field theory. Our method involves fixing the gauge and solving the linearized gravitational field equations to eliminate the metric perturbation variable in terms of the matter variables. In a wide class of cases-which include f (R) gravity, the Einstein-aether theory of Jacobson and Mattingly, and Bekenstein's TeVeS theory-the remaining perturbation equations for the matter fields are second order in time. We show how the symplectic current arising from the original Lagrangian gives rise to a symmetric bilinear form on the variables of the reduced theory. If this bilinear form is positive definite, it provides an inner product that puts the equations of motion of the reduced theory into a self-adjoint form. A variational principle can then be written down immediately, from which stability can be tested readily. We illustrate our method in the case of Einstein's equation with perfect fluid matter, thereby re-deriving, in a systematic manner, Chandrasekhar's variational principle for radial oscillations of spherically symmetric stars. In a subsequent paper, we will apply our analysis to f (R) gravity, the Einstein-aether theory, and Bekenstein's TeVeS theory.

Spontaneous Lorentz symmetry breaking can occur when the dynamics of a tensor field cause it to take on a non-zero expectation value in vacuo, thereby providing one or more "preferred directions" in spacetime. Couplings between such fields and spacetime curvature will then affect the dynamics of the metric, leading to interesting gravitational effects. Bailey & Kostelecky developed a post-Newtonian formalism that, under certain conditions concerning the field's couplings and stress-energy, allows for the analysis of gravitational effects in the presence of Lorentz symmetry breaking. We perform a systematic survey of vector models of spontaneous Lorentz symmetry breaking. We find that a two-parameter class of vector models, those with kinetic terms we call "pseudo-Maxwell," can be successfully analyzed under the Bailey-Kostelecky formalism, and that one of these two "dimensions" in parameter space has not yet been explored as a possible mechanism of spontaneous Lorentz symmetry breaking.Comment: 12 pages, RevTeX format. v2: fixed typos, added footnotes to match PRD versio