Studying tidal effects in planetary systems with Posidonius. A N-body simulator written in Rust

TL;DR

Posidonius is an improved, open-source N-body simulator in Rust that models tidal effects in planetary systems, offering enhanced accuracy, safety, and versatility for studying system evolution and binary star interactions.

Contribution

It introduces a new Rust-based N-body code with improved tidal modeling, better spin integration, and added capabilities for binary star simulations, building on Mercury-T's model.

Findings

Enhanced simulation accuracy and safety with Rust implementation

Incorporation of a new tidal dissipation prescription

Compatibility with binary star system modeling

Abstract

Planetary systems with several planets in compact orbital configurations such as TRAPPIST-1 are surely affected by tidal effects. Its study provides us with important insight about its evolution. We developed a second generation of a N-body code based on the tidal model used in Mercury-T, re-implementing and improving its functionalities using Rust as programming language (including a Python interface for easy use) and the WHFAST integrator. The new open source code ensures memory safety, reproducibility of numerical N-body experiments, it improves the spin integration compared to Mercury-T and allows to take into account a new prescription for the dissipation of tidal inertial waves in the convective envelope of stars. Posidonius is also suitable for binary system simulations with evolving stars.