APOD: Super Planet Crash (2015 Jan 12)

[APOD Robot]

Super Planet Crash

Explanation: Can you create a planetary system that lasts for 500 years? Super Planet Crash, the featured game, allows you to try. To create up to ten planets, just click anywhere near the central star. Planet types can be selected on the left in order of increasing mass: Earth, Super-Earth, Ice giant, Giant planet, Brown dwarf, or Dwarf star. Each planet is gravitationally attracted not only to the central Sun-like star, but to other planets. Points are awarded, with bonus factors applied for increasingly crowded and habitable systems. The game ends after 500 years or when a planet is gravitationally expelled. Many exoplanetary systems are being discovered in recent years, and Super Planet Crash demonstrates why some remain stable. As you might suspect after playing Super Planet Crash a few times, there is reason to believe that our own Solar System has lost planets during its formation.

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[starsurfer]

This is very fun and almost addictive and also very timely for the current climate we live in of almost endless exoplanet announcements!

So far I've managed 44,530 points over 17.3 years, which I think is very good!

[BDanielMayfield]

Man I can't wait to play this game, but I have to wait for it's off to work I must go. Monday morning blues ...

[FloridaMike]

Over 244,000 in 500.1 years. Clicked to register the score and the program said it was #1 ! Woo Hoo !

[Chris Peterson]

One problem with presenting this simulator as a game which ends when a planet is ejected is that we lose sense of the evolutionary nature of planetary systems.

In real life, no system with more than two bodies is stable- the mathematics of chaos is present, and all such systems will eventually fall apart. A less limiting gravitational simulator lets us observe how a system that starts with dozens or hundreds of planet-mass bodies interacts with itself, creates resonances, ejects bodies, until we're left with just a handful of planets remaining in positions of relative stability, able to persist with little change for billions of years.

(I sure hope we don't have any whacky creationists out there attempting to use this simulation as an argument for Creative Design!)

[FloridaMike]

Ok, to score high go for the Habitability Bonus, 27,378,457 in 500.2 years...

[Ron-Astro Pharmacist]

One of the most strangest on-line classes I've ever attempted was on Chaos theory.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory
The double pendulum was enough to make me a believer that once you get any more than a few systems interacting there was little chance of predicting the outcome. One warning – watching the pendulum can get hypnotic.
Z –Z –Z- z
Just had the strangest dream about butterflies. The Lorenz attractor flies in the face of reason. How can something ordered come out of chaos? I guess it's back to class

[Nekoninda]

I'm confused by the indication at the outer circle in the game field, labeled "2.00 AU". This seems to be the "barrier", which ends the game when a planet reaches it. An orbit with a diameter of 2 AU is in the position of Earth, relative to the sun. This indicates that no planet beyond Earth is possible, in this game. And that Earth's orbit is well beyond the "Habitable Zone". What am I missing?

I'd also like to be able to watch the simulation, when a planet moves outside the "barrier". Rather than stopping the simulation at the moment when the planet touches the "barrier", it would be interesting to see what the escaping planet's path would be.

[Chris Peterson]

I'm confused by the indication at the outer circle in the game field, labeled "2.00 AU". This seems to be the "barrier", which ends the game when a planet reaches it. An orbit with a diameter of 2 AU is in the position of Earth, relative to the sun. This indicates that no planet beyond Earth is possible, in this game. And that Earth's orbit is well beyond the "Habitable Zone". What am I missing?

The outside of the simulation is at a radius of 2 AU, not a diameter. That's about where the inner asteroid belt lies in our system.

The simulation is only modeling the inner part of a stellar planetary system, but certainly covers the 1 AU habitable zone.

[BMAONE23]

I got 250,900 with 8 planets: 5 Earths, 1 gas, 1 Earth, and 1 Ice
Near the end the 7th planet began to gain instability though

[bystander]

It would be fun to have one scaled to about 50 AU (just outside Pluto max), or at least outside Neptune (~30 AU). How crowded could the Solar System be?

[FloridaMike]

One problem with presenting this simulator as a game which ends when a planet is ejected is that we lose sense of the evolutionary nature of planetary systems.

In real life, no system with more than two bodies is stable- the mathematics of chaos is present, and all such systems will eventually fall apart. A less limiting gravitational simulator lets us observe how a system that starts with dozens or hundreds of planet-mass bodies interacts with itself, creates resonances, ejects bodies, until we're left with just a handful of planets remaining in positions of relative stability, able to persist with little change for billions of years.

(I sure hope we don't have any whacky creationists out there attempting to use this simulation as an argument for Creative Design!)

I constructed several systems that are stable to the 500 (million??) year limit of the game. They are so stable that running it on 128x speed is the only real option. Most of the time the system looks perfectly stable and then chaos erupts! It would be nice to e able to rewind the game to see what precipitated the collapse.

[Timaru_lad]

Hmmm, every score I register is number 1, so obviously it isn't I did manage to get just over 28,000,000 in 500 years by adding only 1 planet, a dwarf star, which put the 1st planet into a stable tight elliptical orbit.

[BMAONE23]

Woo Hoo
Position 1259
2,954,021
3 planets and a Brown Dwarf

[Timaru_lad]

Woo Hoo
Position 1259
2,954,021
3 planets and a Brown Dwarf

What, it actually gave a position other than number 1? That's strange. BTW I just got 37,276,051 in 500.2 years

[dman]

I'd also like to be able to watch the simulation, when a planet moves outside the "barrier". Rather than stopping the simulation at the moment when the planet touches the "barrier", it would be interesting to see what the escaping planet's path would be.

The escaping planet's path would be a straight line (relative to the sun). Once ejected, there is a very minimal percentage of it ever encountering another significant gravitational force again - it would essentially just hurtle through empty space on that same trajectory until the end of time or a chance encounter with another star / rogue planet.

Although I suppose it would technically be in orbit around the galactic center like the Sun is (hence the "relative to the sun" in the beginning).

[Chris Peterson]

The escaping planet's path would be a straight line (relative to the sun).

Actually, the escaping planet remains in orbit around the Sun until it is perturbed or captured by another body. It's just that it has moved from a closed orbit (e<1) to an open orbit (e>1), a hyperbola. To avoid confusion, the word "orbit" is often replaced with "trajectory" once the eccentricity becomes one or greater. So it isn't traveling in a straight line, but is following a curve.

[gabrielle]

this game no longer works, but to be fair it has been almost a decade since it was posted.