Planetary Giant Impacts: Simulating Moon-Forming Collisions

Giant impacts between proto-planets were a common event in our solar system 4.5 billion years ago. However, understanding their details and consequences is still an open problem. In this thesis I use smoothed particle hydrodynamics to study how pre-impact spin of the proto planets could affect the hypothesised giant impact that formed the Earth--Moon system, as well as developing tools to improve the numerical methods applied to these studies.