Abstract
Formation of the Moon have always interested scientists, and to our recent knowledge, it formed after the Earth experienced a giant impact with an unknown impactor. This theory describes best the specific properties of the Earth-Moon system (mass distribution, orbit), while other theories result in different values.
For Moon forming impacts, the composition of the impactor is not known, it could only be traced back from the resulting satellite, however, the Moon has almost the same isotopical composition as Earth - implying either equally compositioned impactor, or high mixing during the impact.
Traditional Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) formulation tend to create artificial forces between materials, preventing proper mixing, which is a crucial part of Moon formation simulations.
We test different types of SPH formulations from the recent years (GDSPH and ISPH), as they had been shown to improve material mixing (Wadsley et al., 2017; García-Senz et al., 2012; Wissing et al., 2026), to see if they make any difference in the results. We find that there is no clear better performance for either of the models, for a range of impact angles, and they do not show any convergence with increasing number of particles. We also implemented the Equation of State of Wissing and Hobbs (2020a) into Gasoline 2, and we see that it is able to properly model material in a planetary impact scenario.
Supervisors:
- Sijing Shen, Professor at Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics, UiO
- Robert Bleckert Nils Wissing, Researcher at Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics, UiO
Intern. assessor: Boris Vilhelm Gudiksen, Professor at Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics, UiO
Extern. assessor: Christian Reinhardt, Postdoctoral Researcher at University of Zurich