Gravitational Accretion Simulator ← All n-Body Animations

Here we have 2000 massless objects (asteroids) that start out in circular orbits in our Solar System.
The left panel, updated every 10 years, shows where the Sun, planets, and asteroids are as things evolve.
The 2000 asteroids are shown but they are barely visible because they are drawn very small.
The Sun and the planets are drawn a bit bigger and are easy to see.
The coordinate system is counter-rotated so that the Sun is at the center and Jupiter is over a bit to the right.
The other planets seem to bounce all over the place because the display is updated only once every 10 years.

The right panel shows a stack of images taken from the left panel.
By default, the stack gets a new image every 10 years and the stack gets reset every thousand years.
It is interesting to see that the asteroids having roughly the same orbital radii as Jupiter tend to get kicked out of this area becuase Jupiter distorts their orbits.
But, asteroids near Jupiter's L4 and L5 lagrange points tend to be in much more stable orbits.

 

Select starting conditions:
   
Redraw dt = yrs   Integration dt = yrs
n =     G: .
Drag mouse to zoom in and out.


Updated 2023 Dec 17