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Old 20-05-2011, 06:19 AM
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Simple Gravitational Orbit Simulator

This is a bit of fun to play with

http://phet.colorado.edu/sims/my-sol...system_en.html


Try the slingshot or multiple stars may explain those orphan planets.

Bert
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Old 20-05-2011, 08:44 AM
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renormalised (Carl)
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Lots of fun
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Old 20-05-2011, 11:03 AM
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The Four Star Ballet is interesting. What appears to be a perfectly symmetrical, balanced and stable system goes haywire at ~Time=30. Up until that time the positions and velocities are all mirror images of each other. At T=30 the positions start to vary by 0.1.

I assume this is just accumulation of rounding errors in the program. But in the real world it makes you wonder how any long term stable systems manage to develop.
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Old 20-05-2011, 11:07 AM
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Stable is a relative term. The orbits of the planets of our solar system are chaotic at long time frames. We do not perceive this as our lives are short.

bert
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Old 20-05-2011, 11:10 AM
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Nice one Bert!
Enjoyed playing around with it, especially those collisions.

Regards, Rob
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Old 20-05-2011, 11:16 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by avandonk View Post
Stable is a relative term. The orbits of the planets of our solar system are chaotic at long time frames. We do not perceive this as our lives are short.

bert
This implies that evolution needs only a relatively short time to go from nothing to us before we get wiped out.
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Old 20-05-2011, 11:19 AM
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multiweb (Marc)
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This is such a great visual tool. Loads of fun I agree. I have an old program that is a galaxy collider with 1000s of dots representing stars. Similar functionality. YOu set the intitial vectors and numbers of galaxies. Gotta dig it out on my HD and post a link.
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