Friday, August 24, 2007

Gravity Well Model

I'm trying to learn MATLAB, a mathematical programming language. I thought about visualizing the gravitational field of our Solar System, just for fun. Here is the result of a few hours of thinking, programming and playing with MATLAB.

The figures show the strength(magnitude) of the gravitational field caused by some point-masses. The magnitude is plotted on the z-axis and is logarithmic! The x and y-axis are spatial coordinates and are linear. This thus shows the gravitational field of a 2D cut-out made through the plane in which all celestial bodies move. (click images for high-resolution)
The Gas Giants of our Solar System. The masses of the other planets are too small to be visible in one figure.


Close-up of Jupiter and the Sun. 4 equal stars. A top view of 5 stars. Mars and Earth around the Sun.

I also programmed a mode that generates random stars. You can set the number of stars and it will do the rest. It only takes a few seconds to render these figures.

3 comments:

cybrbeast said...

cool, that looks nice.
What are those spikes tat come out of the plane instead of down into it? Is that where the gravity from different bodies cancels out?

pimp-a-lot bear said...

It reminds me of winamp! Did you use the waterfall command to create these plots?

annom said...

No, a contour3 and surf plot, plotting the values of a large mesh.