Observations of thermonuclear bursts offer opportunities to learn about the neutron stars where they occur, but there are often important astrophysical factors that can systematically affect the inference process. Based on our experience with analysing X-ray data for the MINBAR and other projects, we have assembled a suite of routines to try to take some of the hard work out of burst analysis.

The concord set of tools take the fundamental burst measurements and allow the user to infer (for example) the fuel composition, which in turn constrains the evolutionary state of the mass donor, all while including uncertainties such as the anisotropy of emission introduced by the system geometry. A major motivation of the project is the ability to incorporate model-observation comparisons into wider analysis involving other types of data.

The paper has been published in ApJS and the code is available at Github along with extensive documentation and examples.

Labels: 2022, papers