Closed gabrielfougeron closed 9 years ago
Current investigations tend to show that : (cf Gronchi, G. (2002). Theoretical and computational aspects of collision singularities in the N-body problem.)
It might thus be interesting to restict ourselves to the case of binary collisions.
Our collision model is not so bad, especially since I don't really have any idea how to really improve it. In a nutshell : life is hard.
This issue concerns the singularity of the system of ODEs for long time integration. These events can be categorized into two groups :
Currently, the collision model is the following : Two planets collide iff they are closer than a given threshold. The collision happends right now, in particular, it can only happen at a given time step.
Idea : Predict the time of impact and only then decide if the bodies should collide. More generally, one can criticize the physical grounds of the naive model, which is not satisfying enough. A better model should be designed, giving more space for physical interpretation.