Star-Planet interaction, a short animation

sketchfab

This simulation depicts the unfolding of gas evaporating from a sweltering Jupiter as it orbits its parent star. The motion is tracked in a reference frame moving in tandem with the planet, which is shrouded in a mist of gas. The simulation was created using the MHD code PLUTO (Mignone et al., 2007) and required approximately 55 hours of computation on a 640-processor cluster. The manipulation of data cubes for each time step involved combining IDL and Paraview software. With Paraview, I reduced the intricacy of each mesh using a quadric clustering filter and then exported them as .obj files for each frame. References: Mignone et al., The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, Volume 170, Issue 1, pp. 228-242 (2007); Matsakos et al., Astronomy & Astrophysics, Volume 578, id.A6, 17pp. (2015); Pillitteri et al., The Astrophysical Journal, Volume 805, Issue 1, article id. 52, 18 pp. (2015)