NOTE: Documentation is currently down. Apologies for any inconvenience. You can type vplanet -h or vplanet -H to access the onboard help until this issue is resolved.
VPLanet is software to simulate planetary system evolution, with a focus on habitability. Physical models, typically consisting of ordinary differential equations, are coupled together to simulate evolution, from planetary cores to passing stars, for the age of a system. We strive for full transparency and reproducibility in our software, and this repository contains the source code, extensive documentation, the scripts and files to generate published figures, and scripts to validate the current release. We can't claim we found aliens with closed source software!
To get started, ensure you have clang/gcc installed and follow the QuickStart Guide, and/or the Installation Guide.
VPLanet currently consists of 11 functioning "modules," each containing a set of equations
that models a specifc physical process:
AtmEsc: Thermal escape of an atmosphere, including water photolyzation, hydrogen escape, oxygen escape, and oxygen build-up.
Binary: Orbital evolution of a circumbinary planet.
DistOrb: 2nd and 4th order semi-analytic models of orbital evolution outside of resonance.
DistRot: Evolution of a world's rotational axis due to orbital evolution and the stellar torque (including shape evolution as a function of rotational frequency).
EqTide: Tidal evolution in the equilibrium tide framework.
GalHabit: Evolution of a wide orbit due to the galactic tide and impulses from passing stars (including radial migration).
POISE: Energy balance climate model including dynamic ice sheets and lithospheric compression/rebound.
RadHeat: Radiogenic heating in a world's core, mantle, and crust.
SpiNBody: N-body integrator for the evolution of a system of massive particles.
Stellar: Stellar luminosity, temperature, radius, and mass concentration.
ThermInt: Thermal interior evolution, including magnetic fields, for planets undergoing plate tectonics or stagnant lid evolution.
The examples/ directory contains input files and scripts for generating the figures in Barnes et al. (2020) and all subsequent module descriptions. The Manual/ directory contains the pdf of Barnes et al. (2020), which describes the physics of each module, validates the software against observations and/or past results, and uses figures from the examples/ directory.
An ecosystem of support software is also publicly available. In this repo, vspace/ contains scripts to generate input files for a parameter space sweep. bigplanet/ contains scripts to store large datasets in HDF5 format and quickly calculate summary properties from an integration, such as change in surface temperature. In a separate repository is vplot, which consists of both a command line tool to quickly plot the evolution of a system, and also matplotlib functions to generate publication-worthy figures. Finally, we recommend using approxposterior to quickly obtain posterior distributions of model parameters.
Behind the scenes, the VPLanet team maintains code integrity through continuous integration, in which numerous scientific and numerical tests are validated at every commit. Check the "build" badge above for the current status. See the tests/ directory for the validation checks that the current build passes. The "coverage" badge shows the percentage of the code (by line number) that is currently tested. Additionally, we use valgrind and addresssanitizer to periodically search for memory issues like use of uninitialized memory, accessing memory beyond array bounds, etc. The "memcheck" badge shows the current status of the master branch, either clean (no errors) or dirty. If dirty, check the Issues for more information about the current status. Note that all releases are clean. We are committed to maintaining a stable tool for scientists to analyze any planetary system.
VPLanet is a community project. We're happy to take pull requests; if you want to create one, please issue it to the dev branch. Soon we will include tutorials on adding new input options, governing variables, and modules. It's a platform for planetary science that can grow exponentially, either by adding new physics or by adding competing models for clean comparisons.
Additional VPLanet examples can be found at the following GitHub pages:
Virtual Planetary Laboratory
Rory Barnes
David Fleming
Héctor Martínez-Rodríguez
If you believe you have encountered a bug, please raise an issue using the "Issues" tab at the top of this page.
If you'd like to stay up to date on VPLanet by joining the e-mail list, please send a request to Rory Barnes, rory@astro.washington.edu. You can also follow VPLanet on twitter: @VPLanetCode.
If you use this code to generate results used in any publication or conference contribution, please cite Barnes, R. et al. (2020), PASP, 132, 24502.
VPLanet development has been supported by NASA grants NNA13AA93A, NNX15AN35G, 80NSSC17K048, and 13-13NAI7_0024. We also acknowledge support from the University of Washington and the Carnegie Institute for Science.
Enjoy!
© 2018 The VPLanet Team.