ASTR128 HM - Planetary Dynamics & Earth’s Climate History

Credit(s): 2

Instructor(s): Tamayo

Offered: Spring, alternate years

Description: Emphasis on understanding and modeling how mutual gravitational interactions within planetary systems affect planets’ orbits and spins. We will apply these ideas to elucidating long-term variations in Earth’s global temperature and length of day, as recorded by fossil and ice core data. This climate record over millions of years provides important context through which to interpret recent global warming and separate human from natural causes. Topics include orbital perturbation theory in the three-body and N-body problem, planetary rotation and oblateness, expansions of non-spherical gravity fields, spin-axis evolution, tides, and frequency analysis of time series data. Week by week, students will work to build up an increasingly sophisticated numerical model for the Solar System’s dynamics in Python, tested against analytical solutions in limiting cases.

Prerequisite(s): CSCI005 HM, MATH073 HM, and PHYS024 HM