This repository contains some short snippets of code from astrophysics projects I completed during my fourth year of studying "Physics and Astrophysics" at Trinity College Dublin.
Planetary_System_Formation_Notes.pdf - 31 pages of notes that reflect my own summary and understanding of lectures presented by Professor Luca Matra for the module "Planetary and Space Science" at Trinity College Dublin. These notes are not just a summary of the course, but a detailed walk-through of the fundamental physics explaining planetary disks from gas cloud cores to the formation of terrestrial planets and gas giants.
Exoplanets_RV_curves.py- This code plots RV curves for an exoplanet orbiting a star of known mass for any chosen value of eccentricity and inclination. The final result is a plot of RV curves for an exoplanet for several different arguments of periastron. At the beginning of the code, input the mass of the exoplanet, the mass of the host star, eccentricity, inclination, period and phase offset. At first this seems like a simple task, however for eccentric orbit we need to find the true anomaly as a function of time, which requires solving Kepler's equation. This equation must be solved numerically using the Newton-Raphson method by iteratively updating the mean anomaly until suitable precision is reached. My plots confirm the well known result that changing the argument of periastron doesn't change the RV semi-amplitude.
RV_curve_proof.pdf - A short theoretical proof of the result that the RV semi-amplitude is independent of the argument of periastron.
The minimum requirements for Exoplanets_RV_curves.py are Python 3.9+, numpy, scipy and matplotlib. All the required functions are defined within the Python file/Jupyter notebook.
Email: Marc Lane - lanem2@tcd.ie