Hello everyone 
When I was at university, I did a little extra-curricular project to model solar system formation. I thought I'd mention it here to see if anyone wants to take it up themselves. I didn't have time to finish it, so it was abandoned. That was 10 years ago.
I modelled the transformation of an accretion disc into a star system, but rather than use a 3 or even a 2 dimensional particulate model, I treated mass as a function f(r) of disc radius r.
I estimated the drift of matter density into higher or lower orbits via the imbalance between gravitational and centripetal forces. This was an integral around the disc at a given orbital distance, so introducing the idea of the 2d disc here. I remember some difficulty I had with it being an asymptotic integral too, and I can't remember what I did to resolve that now.
By starting out with different matter distributions for the disc, and pre-calculating orbital velocities to maintain circular orbits at those altitudes, the disc slowly began to shrink. This introduced instability, which propogated throughout the cloud, with some matter choosing to drift out to higher orbits, while some moved in to lower orbits, and the function f took on a wave like shape. Where these driftings met, the matter was assumed to be aggregating into a planet/ring. So the disc would condense into a set of discrete planetary orbits, with known masses. Of course, much collapsed into the origin as the main stellar body. The simulation was unstable though and I couldn't work out why.
That was when I gave up.
I thought it would be interesting for people here if they want to recreate a program like this and get it working properly.
I calculated f(r) for our solar system as it is now, and smoothed/blurred the matter function into something monotone decreasing, and that was the gas cloud that I began my trial simulations with.
The purpose of the project was because I wanted to see if solar systems like ours (about 10 bodies, half of which are terrestrial) are theoretically typical. I still don't know.
Jadzia
When I was at university, I did a little extra-curricular project to model solar system formation. I thought I'd mention it here to see if anyone wants to take it up themselves. I didn't have time to finish it, so it was abandoned. That was 10 years ago.
I modelled the transformation of an accretion disc into a star system, but rather than use a 3 or even a 2 dimensional particulate model, I treated mass as a function f(r) of disc radius r.
I estimated the drift of matter density into higher or lower orbits via the imbalance between gravitational and centripetal forces. This was an integral around the disc at a given orbital distance, so introducing the idea of the 2d disc here. I remember some difficulty I had with it being an asymptotic integral too, and I can't remember what I did to resolve that now.
By starting out with different matter distributions for the disc, and pre-calculating orbital velocities to maintain circular orbits at those altitudes, the disc slowly began to shrink. This introduced instability, which propogated throughout the cloud, with some matter choosing to drift out to higher orbits, while some moved in to lower orbits, and the function f took on a wave like shape. Where these driftings met, the matter was assumed to be aggregating into a planet/ring. So the disc would condense into a set of discrete planetary orbits, with known masses. Of course, much collapsed into the origin as the main stellar body. The simulation was unstable though and I couldn't work out why.
That was when I gave up. I thought it would be interesting for people here if they want to recreate a program like this and get it working properly.
I calculated f(r) for our solar system as it is now, and smoothed/blurred the matter function into something monotone decreasing, and that was the gas cloud that I began my trial simulations with.
The purpose of the project was because I wanted to see if solar systems like ours (about 10 bodies, half of which are terrestrial) are theoretically typical. I still don't know.
Jadzia
