During my highschool I have been an attendant of the astronomy program at the Petnica Science Center working on the dynamical evolution of the dust particles ejected from the surface of the comet nuclei. I was particularly interested in the comets C/2012 S1 - ISON and C/2011 W3 - Lovejoy. Here I had to cope with the problems of modeling the thermodynamical processes on the surface of these comets, threshold conditions for the ejection of certain size classes of the dust particles, calculation of direction and magnitude of the dust particles ejection speed and also I had to numericaly integrate the differential equations of motion for the dust particles with some non-gravitational forces included (Poynting-Robertson effect). In order to examine my results, I analyzed the morphology of the dust tail of the comets, by comparing the pictures I generated with the real pictures from the SOHO. In addition I checked the possibility of meteor showers originating from these comets.
The codes available above were written by me and all the results were generated on my personal computer. I also added some bash scripts for compiling the codes. Furthermore, there is a summary of the research done in the Results folder (written in Serbian, except the figure captions and the abstract at the end).
Further Notes
- Check all the input files before running the code on your own!