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Show HN: Gravity – Interactive solar-system simulator, from Newton to Einstein

qunabu.github.io

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Re: Show HN: Gravity – Interactive solar-system simulator, from Newton to Einstein

#41

Post by somat »

ck2 wrote: post #13
Iolaum wrote: post #11

My physics bias would like to see earth forming while it's constituents were orbiting around the sun. In any case, nice visualization.

that probably happened a few times as well we "stolen" planets or mass from other star systems in the same baby nursery as our sun there is also likely a planet that passed through and yanked away a lot of debris, most of the simulations for tilt etc. don't work without the mystery missing planet I could watch PBS Space Time all day for that kind of stuff, often do letting it play in the background on repeat, so much…

Another interesting concept here is that the solar system is a second generation(minimum) system, too much iron+ for a first generation system. So the first generation star had explode to form all the heavy metals. Where is the original stellar remnant? Is there a Black hole or neutron star or whatever it is called if it can't even make it to neutron star levels in roughly the same galactic orbit as our sun?.

A good follow up question that nobody knows the answer to is "how much iron is in the sun?" The problem as I understand it is we can only directly see the very outer layer where there is no iron, so the standard answer is statistically none, only fractional percentages. But based on the distribution of elements in the solar system I sort of expect a sizable iron core.

Re: Show HN: Gravity – Interactive solar-system simulator, from Newton to Einstein

#46

Post by qunabu »

Invictus1001 wrote: post #34

Really cool project. I'm curious what was the most surprising thing you learned while building this that changed your own understanding of how gravity or orbits work?

What I did is a straight forward model, yet it's still complex. The way to figure it out how it works by observation from earth without tools we have now it's insane. How Copernicus, Kepler, Galilei, Newton, Hubble, Einstein figure it out it just amazing. Science deserves all the kudos!

Re: Show HN: Gravity – Interactive solar-system simulator, from Newton to Einstein

#49

Post by Syntonicles »

This was a lot of fun to explore. I find that naturally I want to click through the animations and observe them for a while before delving into the steps and reading the blurb. It's a bit like skimming around a textbook's headings & figures before reading the chapter, it builds motivation and interest.

One simply change to improve the experience is to keep the Next/Back at fixed locations. The animations and transitions are beautiful, and looking away to chase the moving buttons causes me to drop the visual context.

As a workaround I set the height of .tour-body to 900px and the the whole thing became so much more immersive, like the old planetariums.

Re: Show HN: Gravity – Interactive solar-system simulator, from Newton to Einstein

#50

Post by Thiez »

nonethewiser wrote: post #22

>The Sun’s gravity (red arrow) pulls the Earth straight toward it the whole time — so why no collision? Because the Earth is also moving sideways (green arrow) at 29.8 km/s. Each moment it does fall toward the Sun, but its sideways speed carries it past — it keeps missing. The dashed line shows where inertia alone would send it; gravity bends that straight path into a closed loop. An orbit is simply falling, continuo…

It's not as lucky as you think. We formed from the same cloud that made the sun, so the material that made the earth was already in a fairly stable orbit.
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