Sister blog of Physicists of the Caribbean. Shorter, more focused posts specialising in astronomy and data visualisation.

Tuesday, 12 August 2014

I don't need no stinkin' gravity


Another FLASH simulation gone wrong. More adventures with ram pressure stripping. This time I moved the gas disc inside the computational domain so that the stripped wake would be longer. I also set the density of the initial medium and the inflowing wind to the same value. What I forgot to do was move the gravity... these tests use a fixed analytic potential for the dark matter [I don't remember if we used self-gravity for the gas; we probably did but the dark matter is hugely mass dominant]. So now the disc finds itself not only being blasted by a 1,000 km/s wind but also without having any gravity holding it in place. Oops.

And I rendered it rotating as well this time, just for good measure.

4 comments:

  1. Well if you ever got bored of physics you have a promising career as a VFX artist :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. but at least it is a good looking error :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. If something goes wrong with observations, it's years of work down the drain.
    If something goes wrong with simulations, it looks pretty and can be re-done in an hour. :)

    ReplyDelete

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