I may be completely off with my assumptions, but it is worth a shot. For the sake of good science, I am going to throw out a few ideas just to see if something sparks a worthwhile solution. And this is a big part of why we love making it. This is especially a challenge when attempting to do this in real-time on a home computer, which is why researchers run numerical simulations on supercomputers which take days to complete. This solution is just a proposed idea right now, and is not a high priority for us, as we already have a big list of exciting features planned.īut we think it is useful to understand the complexity of accurately simulating the motions of hundreds to thousands of objects interacting gravitationally. But we think it could be an improvement over the current system and its limitations, which leave you with the choice of either destabilizing the orbits with massive errors, or waiting days for the simulation to advance the millions of years needed for the Sun to evolve. The other, much smaller forces tend to have little effect overall in non-chaotic systems. The Sun, however, is the most significant factor by far, because it is much more massive than any other object in our solar system.
#Universe sandbox 2 habitable zone series
So if you collapse an n-body simulation into a series of two-body problems, the simulation could take one big step forward, instead of taking the small steps needed for calculating it as an n-body problem. Solving a 2-body problem is much easier than solving an n-body problem. So how can we get around this problem? How can we accurately simulate thousands of objects while still allowing for large steps forward in time? For example, what if you wanted to simulate our solar system on a time scale of millions of years per second so that you could see the evolution of our Sun? One solution proposed by Thomas, our physics programmer, is to allow for a special mode within simulations running at high time steps. Moons crash into planets, Mercury gets thrown out of the solar system - things like that. And the greater the error, the more likely it is that an orbit, which otherwise would be stable, falls apart. This means the potential for greater error. If you crank up the time step, the simulation then has to take fewer, larger steps.
Solving an n-body problem requires calculating how each object affects each other object every step of the way.Įrrors will still happen, but taking smaller steps reduces them. So to account for all of these gravitational forces, you need to use an n-body solution. The same is true when looking at the Sun and Earth: the Sun is not the only object pulling on Earth. The issue here is that the Moon is not affected gravitationally by just the Earth it is also being pulled by the Sun, and Jupiter, and every other object in space. The Earth pulls on the Moon quite a bit, keeping it in orbit, and the Moon pulls on the Earth just a little bit. For example, you can look at the Earth and Moon as a two-body problem. Orbits of major planets and all possible dwarf planets in our solar system.