README.rst

N-body Orbital Evolution of the Solar System

Warning

This example is currently broken. Check out this issue.

Overview

Orbital evolution from an N-body model.

Date	10/30/18
Author	Hayden Smotherman
Modules	SpiNBody
Approx. runtime	20 min (VPLanet) 10 Min (HNBody; optional)

This example uses SpiNBody to model the orbits of the solar system planets and compares the results to a similar simulation run by HNBody v1.0.10 (Rauch & Hamilton 2002). The output files for hnbody are generated using the HNBody input script SpiNBody_Comparison.hnb.

To run this example

# Run hnbody (optional)
hnbody ss.hnb

# Make the plots
python makeplot.py <pdf | png>

Expected output

Evolution of Earth's slowly varying orbital elements in a Solar System simulation over the next 100,000 years. Black is VPLanet results; red is HNBody. The lower right panel shows the energy and angular momentum conservation for VPLanet only.