For all you astronomers: A browser-game where you simulate a solar system.

[DetlefK]

http://www.stefanom.org/spc/#

The goal is to design a solar system with as many planets as possible but without planets colliding with each other. The tricky part is that the planets also have gravitational attraction with each other.




This was programmed by an astronomer. When the game originally came out a few years ago, he said in an interview that he sent it out to his astronomer colleagues for testing and mysteriously no more work got done that afternoon.

[Karadeniz]

1. Sounds fascinating and just the thing to keep me from postponing all the work I need to do!

[Boomer]

2. This was fun

After a few early crashes, I managed to keep one system going for 500 years.

[JohnnyRingo]

3. nice!

Had a good time with it. I'll be back tomorrow.

Thanx for posting!

[burrowowl]

4. K&R

[Nitram]

5. Decades ago I had an app on my Apple II where you could create solar systems. It was a blast!

Some were so unstable they went out of existence very quickly. Others lasted much longer before a collision destabilized them.

[llashram]

6. thank you

looks like fun. Shall visit very soon I'm sure.

[Gore1FL]

7. That is crazy

I cannot tell you how much my eyes hurt tracking all of those objects. But I'd do it again!

[relayerbob]

8. As a physicist

I find this game too unrealistic to really be interesting. Sorry about that. No planets smaller than earth. Circular, non-elliptical orbits. No solid evidence that any real system has many, much less a dozen planets orbiting within 2AU of the sun - there's a reason behind orbital mechanics and why things work the way they do. Further, pausing it for careful placement of the planets allow approximate doubling of whatever your initial conditions are. Seems more like a good exercise in programming skills. I know, I'm a spoil-sport, probably a grammar nazi too, lol

Building super explosive systems is more interesting to me. See how many planets can be ejected into interstellar space.

[DetlefK]

9. The orbits are elliptic.

If you put a heavy planet close to the Sun you can see that the center of mass is no longer inside the Sun.

Also, I doubt that numerically solving a 12-body-problem is a trivial task.

And the 2AU limit is because this is a game: There needs to be a condition to challenge the player.