Steven,
A few years back I also wrote a program that handled a central large star like object with another orbiting it. I had a plan to eventually include a small number of other objects that were to interact gravitationally, but never found the time to complete the project. I was curious about how different attraction laws effected the orbits of planets, and the answer was loud and clear; forget about anything except for the second order case! I observed the elliptical orbits and that was about the end of that project. I am happy to hear that you did something similar but much more extensive. If you get a chance, take a look at that program that I was mentioning (Planets). One item that I find particularly interesting is that you can call up a flood of small planets to interact simultaneously. The behavior that you witness is quite impressive and it makes the fact that our solar system is relatively stable seem fortunate. I did notice that very few moons appear orbiting my planets. My suspicion is that most of the moons seen today are a result of collisions between the main planet and smaller objects. Apparently the blast kicks out a mass of material that then condenses into the many moons. Each of these mirrors the original formation of the sun and its system. I am confident that some of the early moons found themselves ejected by their brothers on occasion. If you are curious, you can load Linux in parallel with your standard system that preserves your original operating system and data. That is what I did to be able to use whichever one I desire. Unfortunately, I went overboard and now have three Windows Vista systems and two Linux systems present on this one computer. Hey, I had the 3 hard drives available! :-) Dave -----Original Message----- From: OrionWorks - Steven Vincent Johnson <[email protected]> To: vortex-l <[email protected]> Sent: Fri, Jan 3, 2014 8:39 pm Subject: RE: [Vo]:[OT]Star Object Ejection Process Hi Dave, I tend to concur with your suspicions that the effect is most likely real, this based on my own computations of simple planetary orbits. I have used both single precision and double precision in my simulations. Rounding off errors appeared to be negligible. As far as my own personal observations went I saw little if no difference between SP vs DP. A science program like NOVA recently did a program on how NASA began to use sophisticated gravity assist trajectories in order to shoot satellites out in to further regions of the solar system. The point being, if you have a lot of extra patience the trip can be performed with far less rocket fuel than traditional means. On a related matter, a couple of months ago you may recall I posted on Vort a personal discovery I made concerning what I later learned is actually a derivative of Kepler’s 3rd law, that the square of the orbital period of a planet is directly proportional to the cube of the semi-major axis of its orbit. I stumbled across a much more simplified observation of the 3rd law: All orbits that share the same orbital period also share the same distance in their major radius. I didn’t know at the time whether this observation had been made by others, so I posted my findings out on Vortex. See: http://personalpen.orionworks.com/kepler4thlaw.htm Someone eventually was kind enough to point me to a link that correlated my personal observation with Kepler’s 3rd law. Yes, the observation had already been made. Alas, my hope for fame (and bragging rights) had been dashed. Nevertheless, it was fun to discover the fact that some personal observations I had made about planetary motion based on computer simulations I had personal designed turned out to be confirmed as true. I still think the observation should officially be described as Kepler’s honorary 4th law of planetary motion. ;-) PS: The Kiplinger letter for this Friday made the comment that China’s recent successful rover landing on the moon will fuel some fears in congress that NASA should get a little extra funding boost for planetary research. It will be nothing near the glories of the space race of the sixties. But a modest financial boost never the less. (I love watching the movie: “The Right Stuff.”) Regards, Steven Vincent Johnson svjart.OrionWorks.com www.zazzle.com/orionworks tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/newvortex/
