notes

While waiting for my PhD thesis comments, I created a computational astrophysics lab.

This has been used, quite satisfactorily, for the computational physics lab of the third-year undergraduates of the University of Melbourne, Australia.

The students spent 6 days of three hours each over two weeks learning the basics of N-body simulations with the example of a Milky Way sized galaxy. The code is able to toggling the gravitational effects of the Dark Matter halo of the galaxy. The students gain an understanding of the importance of the DM for the dynamical stability of system like our Galaxy.

See here for the associated code and notes. Please get in touch if you want to know more about this!