Epsilon Aurigae Simulator Tutorial

Here we offer a quick introduction to the epsilon Aurigae orbit simulator, written by Mark SubbaRao, a research scientist at the University of Chicago and an Astronomer at the Adler Planetarium.  This visualization is meant to provide you with the tools to see how well various parameters recreate the photometric light curve observed during the past and current eclipses.

At the top is the location where the resultant light curve will be plotted when the simulator is executed.

The controls region lets you run, pause and reset the light curve generator.

At the bottom are a series of sliders that allow you to set various parameters.  You can either use the sliders to adjust the parameters or click inside of the text boxes, delete the number, and type in the value you want.

The first two sliders allow you to adjust the mass of the disk plus B-star, and the F-star's mass.

The disk thickness slider adjust the edge-on thickness of the disk.  In one extreme the disk can be paper thin (left) or at the other extreme it is 1 AU thick (right)

The disk opening slider controls the size of the central hole.  This scales as a percentage of the total radius of the disk.  On the left the disk hole is almost zero, and on the right it is the maximum size.

The disk inclination slider controls the out-of-the-sky tilt of the disk.  On the left the disk is tilted downward to -10 degrees, and on the right the disk is tilted upward by 10 degrees.

The disk radius slider increases and decreases the outer radius of the disk.  The minimum radius is 1 AU, the maximum is 10 AU

The orbital plane tilt slider controls the out-of-the-sky tilt of the orbit.  The best way to visualize this may be just to start the simulator running and change the slider, but to give you a quick idea of what the slider does here are a few images:

This slider is limited to plasuable values based on orbital solutions.  When you adjust this slider, you are really defining the tilt of the plane of the orbit with respect to the plane of the sky.  At 90 degrees (the default value) the orbital plane is perpendicular to the plane of the sky which means the orbit goes directly in and out of the plane of the sky.  At other values, you get a projection of the orbit.  You can also think of this as moving the camera's location above and below the plane in which the star and disk orbit.

Lastly there is the disk tilt slider which controls the rotation of the disk in the plane of the sky.  This is a tilt in the plane of the sky:

Now that you know the basics, you can get started using the epsilon Aurigae Simulator!