This repository contains the scripts to generate the data and figures used in the "The Ice Coverage of Earth-like Planets Orbiting FGK Stars" by Wilhelm et al. (2021), accepted to the Planetary Science Journal. We used VPLanet v2.1 to simulate the formation of polar and equatorial ice of "Earth-like planets" orbiting F, G, and K type stars for a range of orbital and rotational parameters.
We performed two qualitatively different types of simulations:
- Static Cases in which the obliquity, eccentricity, and precession angle of the planets are held fixed.
- Dynamic Cases in which the eccentricity and obliquity vary sinusoidally and the precession angle is calculated self-consistently. The amplitudes and periods of eccentricity and obliquity are randomly generated with various assumptions.
These parameter sweeps were performed with VSPACE and multi-planet, which are Python codes that generate initial conditions for VPLanet simulations and then perform those simulations across multiple cores, respectively. We then used BigPlanet to compress and organize the data for analysis and long-term storage.
The instructions presented here assume you have installed VPLanet, VSPACE, multi-planet, and BigPlanet.
To reproduce the results in Wilhelm et al., first follow the instructions in the StaticCases and DynamicCases directories to generate the raw data. You can then reproduce the figures by following the instructions in the other subdirectories. Note that Figures 1 and 2 from the paper are presented in the IceBelts example in the VPLanet repository.