project 2

This project aims at using various numerical techniques to determine if Nemesis, a hypothetical brown dwarf companion to the Sun, is responsible for the 26 million-year periodicity in the extinction of Earths living species due to perturbing comets in the Oort cloud.

This project achieved the following:

• Used Newtons law of gravitation to generate first-order differential equations that describe the motion of planets in the solar system.
• Used the 4th order symplectic Euler integrator to solve the ODE numerically and got each planets’ equation of motion under the condition of conservation of the total energy and the total angular momentum of the solar system.
• Used change of variables and simulated Nemesis different effects on the comets by changing 3 major parameters in the code and analyzed if these comets were dragged towards the Earth.

The project report is available here.