Tag Info

13

Not sure if these kinds of questions are allowed here, but I may as well answer it. Universe Sandbox 2 is mostly realistic. Its accuracy degrades as you increase the flow of time. The slower the time, the more accurate the calculations. This means that if you want to simulate the Solar System over a long period of time, it won't be very accurate. If you ...

8

At high temperatures, do planets glow like blackbodies? Yes, and at low temperatures too!1 1As @DavidHammen points out, since there's likely going to be a star nearby the planet, it will also be reflecting light from it, so the "glowing" with thermal radiation may in some cases be masked or at least mixed with reflected thermal radiation from the ...

6

Who can say for sure? I guess the physics in Universe Sandbox is not good enough. What I would say though is that if you have a "protostar" that contains a higher proportion of heavy elements than a usual star, then the threshold for ignition of hydrogen will be lower than 75 Jupiter masses (e.g. How large can a ball of water be without fusion ...

4

As noted by @MikeG in this comment, the Universe Sandbox 2 FAQ addresses the question, but not in a satisfying or helpful way: Does it account for relativity? No, the physics in Universe Sandbox² is currently only Newtonian. Why? The short answer is that you need a supercomputer to accurately simulate general relativity. (emphasis added) Jenn, ...

4

If all you need is a quick and free tool to visualize orbits around earth, websites such as the following might be enough: First, the very simple orbitalmechanics.info, where you can just ignore the "add launch" option: And then, the more artsy Harmony-of-the-Spheres, which can also visualize some other systems. Maybe that already helps.

3

The mass at which a star is able to condense into a black hole upon its death is called the Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff Limit, which is roughly 2.17 solar masses. At this mass, the Schwarzschild radius of the black hole (the size of its event horizon) is about 6410 meters by the equation $$r_s = \frac{2GM}{c^2}.$$ EDIT: I'd also like to add that the ...

2

Because this has gone unanswered, and using this very nice answer as a reference, I can answer this part way. Source article here. it was found that if the mass of second body becomes larger than 1/1200 of the first body, horseshoe orbits become unstable. So Earth mass orbiting Jupiter (1/318) won't work according to the research above. You could try ...

2

A NEO only impacts Earth if both bodies are in the orbit intersection zone at the same time, closely enough for gravity $(F \propto 1/r^2)$ to bring them in contact. In a simulation, the timestep should also be short enough to detect a collision. An object at a moderate relative speed of 10 km/s crosses Earth's diameter in about 20 minutes; a longer timestep ...

1

Impact probabilities are probabilities because there are uncertainties in the orbits themselves, as well as in the simulation or propagation. In other words the measurements used to produce the starting points have plenty of observational uncertainties, and the error in the simulation grows due to these uncertainties grows the longer you run it for. So ...

Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible