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CurveSimulator: A Star System and Light Curve Simulator

What does CurveSimulator?

CurveSimulator generates videos depicting the movements and eclipses of celestial bodies along with their resulting light curves. The video output simultaneously displays an overhead view and an edge-on view of the star system, accompanied by a graph showing the system's total luminosity over time.

Users can specify the physical properties of stars and planets in their system through a configuration file. Additionally, various parameters for the desired video output can be set. To gain a deeper understanding of how orbital elements influence the orbits shown in the video, refer to the Orbital Elements section.

For more detailed information on the inner workings of CurveSimulator, explore the How CurveSimulator Works section.

Why use CurveSimulator?

• CurveSimulator is especially useful for star systems that contain objects that sometimes eclipse each other. Especially exoplanets detected using the transit method.

• When writing a paper about a star system, include a video or a link to a video in the paper.

• Use CurveSimulator to verify your results for the physical properties of the star system (masses, radii, orbital elements, ...). Generate a video using your results and check if the simulation's results (time of transit, depth of transit, impact parameter, ...) match your expectations. If not, maybe add an additional, fictional planet and see how this changes the outcome.

• Track changes in orbiting periods and the resulting transit variations.

• It takes just 2 lines of python code to produce the video.

• CurveSimulator is fast and the videos use very little disk space. A video takes about the same time to produce as its playing time and uses less than 0.5 MB disc space per minute.

Getting started

1. Install the package, for example with "pip install curvesimulator".

2. CurveSimulator uses ffmpeg to convert the data into a video. Find and download an executable version of ffmpeg via ffmpeg.org. Extract the downloaded zip file and (on Windows) add "yourdriveandpath\FFmpeg\bin" to the environment variable PATH.

3. Create a Python script with this code.

4. Download this example config file to the directory containing your Python script.

5. Run your script. If all went well, you have just generated your first video with CurveSimulator. If not, contact me.

For questions and comments open an issue on GitHub.