Gravitational Interaction Simulator

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This Demonstration lets you simulate several systems acted upon by Newtonian gravitation. You can start or stop a simulation with the "start" and "stop" buttons and use the "presets" drop-down menu to load predefined situations. Planets can be created by clicking their positions and dragging to giving them initial velocities. The mass of created planets can be controlled with the "" slider. Planets are assumed to undergo an inelastic collision when they touch. The mass of a planet is represented by color and radius. The gravitational constant is
set equal to 0.00002 for convenience.
Contributed by: Sharad Vikram (May 2011)
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA
Snapshots
Details
Snapshot 1: one stage in the "spiral" preset
Snapshot 2: one stage in the "moon" preset
Snapshot 3: a situation created from scratch in "sandbox" mode
This simulator was inspired by a Flash-based simulator at http://www.nowykurier.com/toys/gravity/gravity.html.
Permanent Citation
"Gravitational Interaction Simulator"
http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/GravitationalInteractionSimulator/
Wolfram Demonstrations Project
Published: May 16 2011