Messing with the solar system.....

[Meredith]

I was bored so I downloaded a program that can simulate solar systems. I went into it and made a new "system" consisting of a neutron and another neutron sitting 2 meters away from each other with accurate masses and what not. I then proceeded to kick the time adjustment in the pants so that a million years would pass in a the blink of an eye and set the thing into motion.


My computer literally ran out of time and both Neutrons at the end of whatever program limits, (which caused the program to crash) were still happily sitting 2 meters apart.


Kinda makes you wonder about how weak gravity actually is......

 

[Lindley]

I presume they were spinning around each other, right?

 

[Christopher]

Kinda makes you wonder about how weak gravity actually is......

Gravity is by far the weakest of the fundamental interactions. That's why it's only significant when you get a really huge amount of mass together. It's why the magnetic force of a 1-ounce magnet can cancel out the gravitational force of a six septillion-kilogram planet.

 

[Meredith]

I presume they were spinning around each other, right?

Nope just sitting there 2 meters apart for all eternity, or what seemed like it.....

no motion, just their mass there to interact with one another....

 

[Christopher]

Of course, a simple simulator application downloaded off the Internet isn't going to be an exact representation of real physics. The mass of a neutron is probably too low for this particular program to register.

Let's see. A neutron has a rest mass mass of 1.675 x 10^-27 kg. At 2 m distance, the acceleration between them would've been:

a = F/m

where F = G(m1)(m2)/(r^2) = G(m^2)/(r^2)

therefore a = Gm/r^2 = (6.67E-11Nm^2/kg^2)x(1.675E-27 kg)/(2 m)^2 = 2.79 x 10^-38 m/s^2

The time to cover 2 meters at that acceleration would be:

t = sqrt(2d/a) = sqrt((4m)/(2.79E-38 m/s^2)) = 1.20 x 10^19 s = 379 billion years

So yeah, I guess your simulator was on the right track.

 

[sojourner]

Got a link to that program? Does it do graphic representations or just show the numbers?

 

[Lindley]

Oh, individual neutrons? I thought the experiment was about neutron stars.

 

[Bluesteel]

Can you simulate a Binary star with 5 earth sized planets? My imagination has kicked off.

 

[O'Dib]

What's the name of the program?

 

[T J]

Oh! Come on! You tell us you are playing with some mysterious program that lets you create any desired solar system and run it thru time and you don't think the only thing going on in our minds "What program is that?! What program is that?! What program is that?! "

Everyone who has read this thread has made an exhaustive google search and found nothing like what you describe. Then you disappear without telling us?! Now if it's anything short of the 1701-D stellar cartography we'll all be very disappointed!

In case anyone doesn't get it I'm kidding and am not really chewing out the OP... You know who you are...

WHAT'S THE NAME OF THE PROGRAM!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[Christopher]

It shouldn't be that hard to find programs like that. Just Google for "star system simulator" or "solar system simulator."

 

[Trekker4747]

I've googled around and can't seem to find a suitable program.

 

[Ronald Held]

I presume you want a program executable wth adjustable parameters, not source code like Mercury, SWIFT. Hbody, and others.

 

[Meredith]

Got a link to that program? Does it do graphic representations or just show the numbers?

Here is the program: http://www.tillnow.com/solar/

An oldie but a goodie.....

Thanks for summoning me.....I shall now return to the neither world....

 

[JoeFromEarth]

i found an online one at http://dan-ball.jp/en/javagame/planet/

somehow i created two suns and one planet with a figure-eight orbit

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

In any case, a free neutron would decay in pretty short order to a proton, an electron and an antineutrino -- the half-life is about 10 minutes. I suspect the recoil from the decay would mean that such a weakly-bound system would be disrupted.

 

[Christopher]

^Good point! I forgot about neutron decay. Wow, and apparently our estimate of the neutron half-life has been refined since I was in college. My textbook says it's around 15 minutes, but apparently the best current estimate is 10.61 +/- 0.16 minutes. Although Wikipedia says it's more like 10 minutes, 14 seconds, or 10.23 minutes. Interesting that there's still uncertainty over that.

 

[Jadzia]

A neutron has a rest mass mass of 1.675 x 10^-27 kg.

There's a good chance that the changes to the system would be below the level of representability. So the program would show no motion at all, even in infinite time.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

A neutron has a rest mass mass of 1.675 x 10^-27 kg.

There's a good chance that the changes to the system would be below the level of representability. So the program would show no motion at all, even in infinite time.

Any program readily downloadable on the Internet would probably also fail for super-dense objects such as two nearly-touching neutron stars. You'd need General Relativity to model the loss of energy from the system due to gravitational radiation. I also doubt that such programs
reliably model any Newtonian system that contains more than 2 objects. However, it is fun though to set up a multi-body system and watch it evolve over time.

 

[STR]

i found an online one at http://dan-ball.jp/en/javagame/planet/

somehow i created two suns and one planet with a figure-eight orbit

Somehow, I got two gas giants to collide. They split into 4 small sized planets. I did it a couple of times and eventually got a large planet with moons orbiting it.