Tidal Disruption Explorer

Live Script simulating tidal disruption of a self-gravitating cluster by one or two massive sources in 2D.

This Live Script launches an interactive GUI to simulate a two-dimensional system comprised of a cluster of self-gravitating granular particles subject to the gravitational field of a single or binary stellar system. The GUI allows the user to explore disruption of the cluster by tidal forces. Packaged with this Live Script are BACKGROUND and CHALLENGES documents in Markdown and PDF form that describe the physics and simulation details along with suggested experiments.

This script illustrates the concept of the Roche radius and how to build a GUI application from scratch in MATLAB. It may interest students and instructors of physics, astronomy, and engineering. Many additional educational Live Scripts by the author are here. An HTML version of this app is here.