StarryOrbits Animations

Repository of Animations
Here is a selection of n-body animations that have been contributed by MODEST users. You can download them to your hard disk to watch using StarryOrbits.

Note that some browsers may add ".gz" to your downloaded file name. If so, change the extension back to ".sof" before you load it into StarryOrbits.



8-body AstroSim by Arturo Nakasone. Download (0.3mb).



100-body Grav-Sim by Mark Ridler. Download (2.6mb).



1024-body AstroSim by Arturo Nakasone. Download (4.3mb).



820-body simulation of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies colliding. Download (9mb).

This was based on a 81,920 body data set by John Dubinski as described here. Only every 100th body was used and each had its mass multiplied by 100 to keep the overall mass the same. The 820 body model was then run in Grav-Sim on a home PC for a time of 200 units. You can see the galaxies colliding and they are still distinct entities after the collision. They then swing round again and smash into each other a second time. This time they appear to become one large group of stars.

The stars are colored as follows:

Milky Way disk = red

Milky Way bulge = orange

Milky Way halo = yellow

Andromeda disk = blue

Andromeda bulge = dark green

Andromeda halo = light green

You will need to run StarryOrbits with at least 200MB of memory as shown here for this simulation.

File Format
The open-source file format for StarryOrbits simulation data files is shown here.