Simulating Collisions of Planetesimals and the Formation of Exoplanets

Collisions of planetesimals and formation of planets

Authors:

Dvorak et al

Abstract:

We present preliminary results of terrestrial planet formation using on the one hand classical numerical integration of hundreds of small bodies on CPUs and on the other hand -- for comparison reasons -- the results of our GPU code with thousands of small bodies which then merge to larger ones. To be able to determine the outcome of collision events we use our smooth particle hydrodynamics (SPH) code which tracks how water is lost during such events.