Circumbinary Planetary Systems
Shown here are 180 planets orbiting a binary star system.
The yellow blobs in the center are the two stars.
By default, their total mass is equal to the mass of our Sun.
The smaller blobs are the 180 planets. They all have zero mass.
Hence, they don't interact with each other.
The one that is furthest out is a pale blue dot at 1au from the system's center of mass.
Even though it has mass zero, we can think of it as representing Earth.
The other planets are evenly spaced ranging from 0.3au to 0.9au.
As you can see when the animation starts, the planets that are close to the
center of mass have unstable orbits.
You can speed up the animation by entering a larger number in the "Redraw dt" text box.
Changing the value from its default of 1e-3 to 1.0 makes the whole thing go 1000 times faster.
The white plot on the right shows the eccetricities of each of the 180 orbiting planets.
An eccentricity of 1 corresponds to a planet that has been ejected from this star/planet system.
The colored vertical lines show orbital periods that are in resonance with the orbital period of the binary stars.
Updated 2025 Feb 11