Astrochemistry

Carbox: An End-to-end Differentiable Astrochemical Simulation Framework

By Keith Cowing
Press Release
November 14, 2025
Filed under , , , , , , ,
Carbox: An End-to-end Differentiable Astrochemical Simulation Framework
A figure illustrating the sensitivity of a carbon rich stellar outflow with a MCMC sampler varying reaction rates of the entire network. — astro-ph.GA

Since the first observations of interstellar molecules, astrochemical simulations have been employed to model and understand its formation and destruction pathways.

With the advent of high-resolution telescopes such as JWST and ALMA, the number of detected molecules has increased significantly, thereby creating a need for increasingly complex chemical reaction networks.

To model such complex systems, we have developed Carbox, a new astrochemical simulation code that leverages the modern high-performance transformation framework Jax. With Jax enabling computational efficiency and differentiability, Carbox can easily utilize GPU acceleration, be used to study sensitivity and uncertainty, and interface with advances in Scientific Machine Learning.

All of these features are crucial for modeling the molecules observed by current and next-generation telescopes.

Gijs Vermariën, Tommaso Grassi, Marie Van de Sande, Serena Viti, Stefano Bovino, Alessandro Lupi, Alexander Ruf, Lorenzo Branca, Catherine Walsh

Comments: Accepted at EurIPS 2025 Workshop: Differentiable Systems and Scientific Machine Learning
Subjects: Astrophysics of Galaxies (astro-ph.GA); Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM)
Cite as: arXiv:2511.10558 [astro-ph.GA] (or arXiv:2511.10558v1 [astro-ph.GA] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2511.10558
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Submission history
From: Gijs Vermariën
[v1] Thu, 13 Nov 2025 17:58:57 UTC (455 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.10558

Astrobiology, Astrochemistry, Astronomy,

Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA Space Station Payload manager/space biologist, Away Teams, Journalist, Lapsed climber, Synaesthete, Na’Vi-Jedi-Freman-Buddhist-mix, ASL, Devon Island and Everest Base Camp veteran, (he/him) 🖖🏻