AETHER - Advanced Engine for Three-dimensional High-resolution Emission Rendering

This thesis presents the development of a modeling software called AETHER, designed to visualize the dynamics of the coma of a comet using the Godot Game Engine. When comets, mainly composed of ice and dust, are close enough to the Sun, they sublimate, creating two distinct phenomena: the coma (a cloud of gas and dust surrounding the nucleus) and the tail. Both of these phenomena are affected by solar gravity, radiation pressure, and solar wind. The modeling tool aims to reproduce a numerical model of the phenomena occurring in the inner coma over a given period, compared to telescopic images, as well as their temporal evolution, with particular attention to the visual accuracy. The Godot Engine, an open source 2D and 3D game engine, has been chosen for the development because, compared to other alternatives, it is open source, lighter, and easier to use. Key aspects of the implementation include the definition of the geometrical conditions of the apparition, the physical parameters of a comet's nucleus (orientation of the spin axis, rotation period) along with its emission regions, from which jets of dust are emitted, and the modeling of the emitted dust particles based on their physical parameters (size and density) and the forces to which they are subjected (emission velocity, solar gravity, and radiation pressure). Several tests have been conducted by comparing the results of AETHER with telescopic images of a comet. The results show that the Godot Engine can be used to build a robust and physically accurate tool, without sacrificing performance and realism. Being open source, under license GPL-3.0, this project aims to contribute to the growing field of scientific modeling. Future works include expansion of the mathematical/physical model to also take into account precession of the spin axis and the dynamic motion of the comet along the orbit.