Introducing NEMO

Overview

Teaching: 5 min
Exercises: 0 min

Questions

• What is NEMO and how would I use it

Objectives

• Introducing NEMO

Background

As soon as computers became available to the research community in the 50s, astronomers tackled the problem how to compute the orbits of stars and planets under their common force of gravity: the N-body problem.

The first programs were written in FORTRAN (von Hoerner, Aarseth, van Albada and many others), and we have some of those available for you to experiment with in NEMO!

NEMO

NEMO is a software environment to enable you to study Stellar Dynamics in general and the N-body problem in particular. It has several hundred programs to initialize stellar N-body systems, integrate them in time, study their orbits, convert them to images, and compare them to observations etc.etc.

You will probably be writing scripts to orchestrate a simulation and perform an analysis. We have examples in bash, csh, and python.

NEMO has excellent programs to import data from other codes, as well as export data such that other codes can process our data. We also employ tables in text or CSV format, often an end-point before a plot is made. NEMO also has a good infrastructure to write new programs.

Although NEMO is not an acronym (its etymology is from an attempt to pun nbody to nobody, which became NEMO in latin), a good friend could not help himself and dub it Not Everyone Must Observe, in the vain of this being the first theory package next to a few observers packages back in 1986.

Key Points

• Stellar Dynamics

• the N-body problem

• NEMO