Adam Hibberd
The problem of what happens to a binary system of stars as it approaches a Super-Massive Black Hole, is one which can be handled, to a certain extent at least, by Newtonian physics.
Hills predicted in 1988 that it was possible for ONE of the pair of stars in the binary to be ejected at high speed from the overall 3-body system, thus creating a ‘Hyper-Velocity Star’ which since have actually been observed. His assumption was that everything was Newtonian.
Thus I decided to download the n-body integration software libraries known as ‘reboundx’ onto my Linux computer and try to reproduce this so-called ‘Hills Mechanism’.
‘reboundx’ has all the functionality of ‘rebound’ but also extra built-in functions for modelling effects due to ‘General Relativity’ should I need them in the future.
The very concise overview of how my software works can be found here:
Having written the software I decided to find out what ChatGPT might think about it and its feedback was exceedingly positive. In fact it immediately saw the power and flexibility of the tool I had created for scientific study, see below.
