Astronomy, Astrophysics & Astrobiology

Computational Astrophysics

Many areas in physics rely on computational techniques to study the dynamic evolution of various complex physics problems. All the stimulations performed by the computer should be precise and timely. To make sure that happens, Computational Astrophysics was introduced in the field.

Various Important techniques that are used in computational physics are “Particle-in-cell, particle mesh, N-body simulations, Monte Carlo methods, and grid-free & grid-based methods for fluids.

To perform the above task both hardware and software should be at its ace.  A supercomputer or a cluster of computers is used as the hardware for the computational astrophysics. And various codes tend to be n-body packages. Example being ChaNGa, MODEST, nbodylab.org and Starlab.

AMUSE--one of the software package used by computational astrophysicist takes a different approach than others by giving them an interface structure to a larger number of publicly available astronomical codes for addressing stellar dynamics, stellar evolution, and hydrodynamics.