Giant Impacts

Sample image

Sample Image by NHK CG group - My animations are not this beautifle yet...

SPH simulations of Giant Impact. Impactor (red) hits the protoearth (blue) from parabolic orbits. Time (shown in bottom-right corner) is in unit of 1100 seconds. In the following lists, M₁ and M₂ are the mass of the protoearth and that of the impactor, respectively. J_total is the total angular momentum of the system in unit of the current total angular momentum of the Earth-Moon system, J₀

All movies are GIF animations. If you want to replay the movie, you may need to use xanim or some other animation viewer.

• Series 1. M₂/M₁ = 1/8, J_total = 2J₀
  N=1K, 2K, 4K, 8K, 16K.
• Series 3. M₂/M₁ = 1/8, J_total = 1J₀
  N=1K, 2K, 4K, 8K, 16K, 32K(Beware! THIS IS HUGE), 64K.
• Series 4. M₂/M₁ = 1/8, J_total = 0.5J₀
  N=2K, 4K, 8K, 16K, 32K, 64K.
• Series 5. M₂/M₁ = 1/16, J_total = 1J₀
  N=4K, 8K, 16K, 32K, 64K.