amuse

Amuse is a verb in English meaning to cause someone to find something entertaining or enjoyable; it can also refer more broadly to entertaining or diverting someone. The noun form amusement denotes the state or experience of being entertained. The word originates from Middle English, via Old French amuser, meaning to divert or entertain.

In addition to its common usage, Amuse is the name of an international software project: the Astrophysical Multipurpose Software Environment (AMUSE). AMUSE is a framework designed to coordinate and integrate multiple astrophysical simulation codes within a single, user-friendly interface. It allows researchers to connect codes that specialize in different physical processes—such as gravitational dynamics, hydrodynamics, and stellar evolution—so that complex, multi-physics simulations can be built and run from a common Python-based front end.

Development of AMUSE began in the late 2000s and has been carried forward by an international collaboration of scientists and institutions. The framework emphasizes modularity, interoperability, and reproducibility. Its architecture provides a coupling layer that can orchestrate disparate codes written in different programming languages, enabling researchers to experiment with combinations of methods without rewriting core algorithms.

AMUSE is widely used in theoretical and computational astrophysics to study systems ranging from star clusters and planetary formation to galactic dynamics. By enabling modular integration of community codes, AMUSE supports collaborative research, code reuse, and transparent, repeatable simulations across the field.