orbital_mechanics

time integration of the n-body problem.

Simulation code is written in C++, see celestial_mechanics.h, celestial_mechanics.cc, and the driver code driver.cc. Outputs trajectories to CSV file.
Simulation code is templated by space dimension to simultaneously implement both 2D and 3D dynamics in a dimension-independent way.
Python code to plot and animate the CSV trajectory output can be found in animations.ipynb.

Some animations.

I enjoyed writing this and it helped me get a better feel for n-body dynamics. Pull requests welcome :-)

running the code

In this directory,

run cmake .
compile and run driver.cc with make run
run the jupyter notebook to plot and animate the simulation trajectories

requirements

C++: cmake 3.11+ gcc 10.2+
python, jupyter, numpy, scipy, matplotlib, pandas