One weekend, about a month ago, I threw together a quick simulation of the solar system because I was studying gravitation in school. Since I have some time now I went back and polished it to allow user interaction and remove various glitches. It’s still quite crude, but I’m done dealing with it, so I figured that I’d throw it up here. One of the coolest things it does (IMO) is show the paths of the planets from a non-heliocentric viewpoint.
Everything (code and images) is public domain. Credit is nice, but not necessary. Download code (and runnable jar) here. Created using Slick (Build #266) with LWJGL (2.0b1).
A Geocentric View of the Universe.
Another Geocentric Perspective.
View from Jupiter.
Oh, and I almost forgot! One of the other neat things I did with the simulation was “experimentally” measure the speeds of the planets (except Neptune). I looked up average orbital distances and the mass of the sun on Wikipedia and then tweaked the initial velocity of each planet until the orbit looked roughly circular. I did this mostly out of laziness, but I was shocked at how close I had gotten to the real values.
| Estimated Speed (km/s) | Observed Speed (Average) (km/s) | |
|---|---|---|
| Mercury | 48 | 47.87 |
| Venus | 34.5 | 35.02 |
| Earth | 29.5 | 29.783 |
| Moon | 30.5 | 30.805 = 29.783 (earth) + 1.022 (relative speed of luna) |
| Mars | 24 | 24.077 |
| Jupiter | 13 | 13.07 |
| Saturn | 9.5 | 9.69 |
| Uranus | 6.8 | 6.81 |
One Comment
COOOOOOL!