An introduction to the laws of celestial mechanics and a step-by-step guide to developing software for direct use in astrophysics research.

This book offers both an introduction to the laws of celestial mechanics and a step-by-step guide to developing software for direct use in astrophysics research. It bridges the gap between conventional textbooks, which present a rigorous and exhaustive exposition of theoretical concepts, and applying the theory to tackle real experiments. The text is written engagingly in dialogue form, presenting the research journey of the fictional Alice, Bob, and Professor Starmover. Moving Planets Around not only educates students on the laws of Newtonian gravity, it also provides all that they need to start writing their own software, from scratch, for simulating the dynamical evolution of planets and exoplanets, stars, or other heavenly bodies.

• Maxwell Cai is Advisor of Artificial Intelligence at the SURF Cooperative (i.e. Dutch National Supercomputing Center). • Adrian Hamers is Max Planck Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics. • Javier Roa is Navigation Engineer, Solar System Dynamics Group, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology. • Nathan Leigh is Research Fellow at the American Museum of Natural History.<

1 A Bestiary of Planets
2 Physics Background
3 First Two-Body Code
4 Accuracy and Performance of the Integration
5 Fixed Step-Size Integration
6 Variable Step-Size Integration
7 The Three- and N-Body Problems
8 Gauss-Radau Integrator of Fifteenth Order
9 Symplectic Map for Long-Term Integration
10 Building a Production Code
11 Defining the Project
12 Setting Up the Project
13 Running and Analyzing the Simulations
14 How to Write a Publishable Research Paper
15 Conclusions