Recreation of the Nice Model

The Nice model is a famous set of three papers (Gomes, R et al. 2005, Tsiganis, K. et al. 2005 and Morbidelli, A. et al. 2005) issued in Nature 435. It described the formation of our current solar system trough an instability of Jupiter and Saturn and how this instability can create our current solar system architecture. This project further analyses the Nice-Model with current numerical methods provided by the REBOUND package. For this the following features are

Features

• Provides easy functions to set up and run simulations of four planet systems.
• Routines to rerun simulations to make further analysis possible. That includes.
  • Inclusion of terrestrial planets.
  • Inclusion of an asteroid belt.
  • Injections and dynamical reallocation of Trojans.
• Pseudo 3D representation of simulations.
• Functions to extract parameters from Simulation Archives (see REBOUND Docs).
• Methods to extract the Late Heavy Bombardment by deploying an efficient MOID calculation and implementation of Witherill (1967), Jeong (2017) probability calculations.
  • Collision velocity visualized with histograms.

Getting started

After using pip install niceSystem we can create our first set up for a Nice-like simulation

import rebound
from niceSystem import NiceSystem

nice = NiceSystem(sim = rebound.Simulation())
nice.Initial()
nice.simPlot(particles = ['Jupiter', 'Saturn', 'Ice_1', 'Ice_2'])

This sets up a simulation with initial conditions that looks like this.

To start a simulation we set an integrator and call nice.Simulation()

nice.Integrator(dt = 0.5)
nice.Simulation(end_time = 10000, interval = 1000, archive_filename = 'SimulationArchive.bin')

This integrates the system to a time of 10000 yr and saves a snapshot every 1000 years into the simulationarchive 'SimulationArchive.bin'. From there the parameters can be extracted and when the system is integrated for a long enough time the following evolution of the system might occur.

Roadmap

The project is still ongoing and needs further refinement. The following features are on the agenda.

• Actual 3D interactable plots to further visualize the systems.
• Additional harmonisation with REBOUND such as the ability to convert internal data to different units.
• Improvments to Trojan routine. This includes the ability to run more particles and properly recreate migration pathways.

Overall the code needs overhauls to run faster and more predictable. As well as more streamlined workflow to investigate all aspects of the Solar System.

License

This project uses the REBOUND package and so also uses the same license. That is the GNU General Public License.