Astrophysics (Index)About

N-body simulation

(N-body)
(simulation of many objects gravitationally-bound to each other)

An N-body simulation is a type of computer simulation of planets or stars or other objects and their gravitational interaction. The N-body problem is not generally solvable analytically and simulation is a means to solutions. A simple N-body simulation might be to calculate the gravitational force on each body and thus its acceleration, then estimate where it will be after a small time increment, then repeat. To handle many bodies, e.g., stars in a simulated galaxy, methods of optimizing this have been devised. Among their uses are cosmological simulations. When the number of bodies is intractably large, approximating the overall effect using a smaller number of bodies can sometimes be effective or other means may also used to model the effects of many closely-interacting bodies. In cosmological zoom simulations, portions of high interest or that defy such simplifications may be modeled with finer detail than the simulation at large. Example software:

Some software that also includes hydrodynamics:

An example simulation is Millennium Run.

A very early N-body simulation was carried out in 1941 by Erik Holmberg using an analog method: light bulbs represented the bodies, using the light as an analog of the inverse square law-force of gravity, and adjusting the positions of all the light bulbs after measuring light received and determining net forces.


(software type,simulations,models,code type)
Further reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-body_simulation
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2011EPJP..126...55D/abstract
http://td.lpi.ru/~eugvas/nbody/tutor.pdf
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/pscico-guyb/realworld/www/nbody.html
http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/N-body_simulations_(gravitational)
http://astro.phy.vanderbilt.edu/~berlinaa/teaching/extragalactic/AST8050_12_Nbody_and_halos.pdf

Referenced by pages:
ChaNGa
computational astrophysics
GADGET-2
HERMIT
LasDamas
MERCURY
N-body problem
Navarro-Frenk-White profile (NFW profile)
NBODY
RAMSES
REBOUND
RHAPSODY
semi-analytic model (SAM)
smoothed-particle hydrodynamics (SPH)
spiral galaxy
stellar dynamics

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