2017 Winner: MODELLING ACCRETION STREAM AND DISK EVOLUTION IN WASP-12/b

Project Information
MODELLING ACCRETION STREAM AND DISK EVOLUTION IN WASP-12/b
Physical and Biological Sciences
Physics 182
WASP-12b is a hot Jupiter orbiting dangerously close to its parent star WASP-12 at a radius 1/44th the distance between the Earth and the Sun, or roughly 16 times closer than Mercury. WASP-12’s gravitational influence at this incredibly close proximity generates tidal forces on WASP-12b, which along with being highly irradiated from WASP-12, distorts the planet into an egg-like shape. As a result, the planet’s surface overflows its Roche lobe through L1, transferring mass to the host star at a rate of 270 million metric tonnes per second. This mass transferring stream then circularizes to form an accretion disk. The quasi-ballistic stream trajectory is approximated by that of a massless point particle released from the first Lagrangian point, L1. Based on these ballistic results, we then apply a comprehensive fluid treatment by way of the hydrodynamical code FLASH to directly model the behavior of mass transfer in a non-inertial reference frame and subsequent disk formation. We hope to employ this model to generate virtual spectroscopic signatures and compare them against collected light curve data from the Hubble Space Telescopes Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS).
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Students
  • Ian Curtis Weaver (Merrill)
Mentors