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Posted by qunabu 8 hours ago

Show HN: Gravity – interactive solar-system simulator, from Newton to Einstein(qunabu.github.io)
Just for fun and self education, I've built this over a weekend to teach myself why orbits exist, not just show planets going around. Something that was never clearly explain to me in school. It opens with a guided tour that builds the idea up step by step: two bodies and the equal/opposite force, inertia (the Sun is removed and Earth just drifts straight), then "an orbit is falling and continuously missing," cosmic velocities with a little rocket, Voyager 1 & 2's real gravity assists (the clock runs the actual 1977–1989 dates so the planets orbit into their grand-tour alignment and the slingshots line up), and it ends on Einstein — gravity as curved spacetime, the classic rubber-sheet well. What's real: every body uses its real radius/mass and J2000 orbital elements; positions come from solving Kepler's equation each frame. You can toggle to an N-body mode (symplectic leapfrog) that shows live energy drift (~1e-6%) so you can see the integrator is honest. The only thing faked is scale — at true scale you can't see anything — so there's a toggle between true scale and a log-remapped "visual" scale, with physics always running in real AU. Tech: TypeScript + Three.js + Vite, fully client-side, no backend, works offline (surface textures are generated procedurally from value-noise; only Earth uses a real image). Source: https://github.com/qunabu/Gravity

Happy to answer questions — and feedback on the physics or the explanations is very welcome. This project might be totally inaccurate in terms of real physics, this is how i do understand this on my own - i'm happy to confront this with reality

95 points | 23 commentspage 2
Brendinooo 6 hours ago|
Super fun! I might show it to my kids later today. Thanks for making it!
genpfault 6 hours ago||
> Einstein

How are you handling relativistic effects in the N-body simulation?

qunabu 6 hours ago|
Not in the sim right now — it's purely Newtonian (symplectic leapfrog, classical gravity). I show the concept on the last slide ("Einstein: gravity is curved spacetime") — a curve in space wrapping around a star/planet that pulls nearby objects into the well. The quantitative case, Mercury's ~43″/century perihelion precession, I'd add next as a 1PN correction — haven't gotten to it yet. Will try to figure it out how to show this
ck2 5 hours ago||
the way the original mathematicians figured all this out absolutely melts my brain

no computers, no calculators, barely working telescopes looking at the moons orbiting Jupiter

(don't be limited by episode title, lots of amazing astrophysics in there)

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yhk1EZq9tY

cdogukank 5 hours ago|
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