Bloodhound

Under Construction

Update (March 2026): Bloodhound is currently undergoing major updates and is temporarily unavailable. If you are interested in using it or would like to be notified when the new version is released, please contact me.

Bloodhound (Kong, Boylan-Kolchin & Bullock 2025) is a Python package designed to track dark matter substructure in cosmological simulations. It uses a direct particle-tracking approach that overcomes the limitations of conventional halo finder + merger tree pipeline.

What was wrong with traditional tracking tools?

How does Bloodhound work?

User Guide

Python Dependencies

Bloodhound requires the following Python packages:

Astropy
h5py
NumPy
pandas
SciPy

Required Input Data

Bloodhound requires the following input datasets: *** make sure to write where these files need to be! ***

Simulation snapshots
Rockstar halo catalogs
Rockstar .bin files
Consistent-trees full merger tree data: tree.hdf5
Snapshot time information: snapshot_redshift_scale-factor.txt