I'd like to report a bug that violently ramming about 13 maximum-size gas giants into the center of the Solar System crashes this simulator. But Earth was still like 45% habitable, so we've got...
I'd like to report a bug that violently ramming about 13 maximum-size gas giants into the center of the Solar System crashes this simulator. But Earth was still like 45% habitable, so we've got that going for us
This is really an accomplishment. I don't think I ever predicted that I would be able to play Universe Sandbox on a mobile phone. This is going to be a wonderful teaching tool. One of my personal...
This is really an accomplishment. I don't think I ever predicted that I would be able to play Universe Sandbox on a mobile phone. This is going to be a wonderful teaching tool.
One of my personal hobby horses is the Gaian Bottleneck hypothesis and how, unfortunately, stellar evolution proceeds much faster than biological evolution. As a result, stars move their Goldilocks Zones faster than life can evolve, adapt, or respond beyond early stages. The reason that we exist at all to have this conversation is more a matter of speculation, rather than settled science.
You have a habitability index on your app. Stellar evolution is slow on human time scales. What if you gave the user the ability to shift time forward and see how a star will evolve in 500 million or a billion years and how that will change habitability on a planet?
Thank you so much for the kind words. I love the feature idea, I’ll look into it and I’ll let you know how it goes. It definitely sounds doable. the habitability simulation is also something I...
Thank you so much for the kind words. I love the feature idea, I’ll look into it and I’ll let you know how it goes. It definitely sounds doable. the habitability simulation is also something I want to learn more about as I go, since I find the topic fascinating!
Ha, what a fun simulator. I spawned a planet between Mars and Jupitor... Io and Europa got jealous and broke away from Jupitor at some point. They've been hanging close but not too close. Then I...
Ha, what a fun simulator. I spawned a planet between Mars and Jupitor... Io and Europa got jealous and broke away from Jupitor at some point. They've been hanging close but not too close.
Then I spawned a massive gas giant between Neptune and Uranus. Neptune butted heads a couple times with the newbie then left the system for a while. Uranus just did a spin around it and launched a bit behind Neptune. They eventually came back only to get scared and left again.
Finally, placing the biggest gas giant right around mercury's orbit with the arrow pointed out and time set to year/s made for a neat pattern. It apparently dragged the sun with it as it spun creating increasingly intricate patterns. I had set it to green, it's now black. My goal was a black hole... did I succeed? :D Oh wait no, if I center on it instead of the sun the green comes back. Just added a couple more to it... wow the patterns are neat!.... Oh no the sun just got launched! It's disasterous, the green gas giant went one way and the sun and new gas giant went the other, the center of the solar system now stands empty! Planets are shooting off in straight lines.
Hehehe, destroyed the solar system, 5 stars from me! :D
Feel free to try it and let me know what you think. It's kind of a universe sandbox running in the browser. I've been working on this for a while now. You can replace/spawn planets/stars generate...
Feel free to try it and let me know what you think.
It's kind of a universe sandbox running in the browser. I've been working on this for a while now.
You can replace/spawn planets/stars
generate random systems
and now you can also watch particle simulations. I'm working on getting collisions to work, and in the meantime you can watch the accretion disk or nebula do it's thing.
There's also a few creative aspects: you can draw dust and watch the particles move.
Looks interesting! Steps 3-7 in the tutorial don't recognize when I have done the requested action, so I have to manually skip to the next step each time.
Looks interesting! Steps 3-7 in the tutorial don't recognize when I have done the requested action, so I have to manually skip to the next step each time.
Well done. I think a neat feature would be to show our solar system at the current datetime, maybe updating in real time. Then, also allow travelling around to an arbitrary datetime in history, or...
Well done. I think a neat feature would be to show our solar system at the current datetime, maybe updating in real time. Then, also allow travelling around to an arbitrary datetime in history, or the future, and playing from there. I also noticed Earth's moon repeatedly causing a solar eclipse, heh.
try it out now. The simulation now starts with our current alignment. I also love that I can now go back and look at solar eclipses. Added a 10 minute per second mode now too, to look at things in...
try it out now. The simulation now starts with our current alignment.
I also love that I can now go back and look at solar eclipses. Added a 10 minute per second mode now too, to look at things in detail. Still seeing some bugs, but I could see the solar eclipse 11 august 1999 - The trajectory is just not 100% there
Great! I know this project must be a fair bit of work for you, but I'll admit that one of the next thing I was looking for was a way to specify time granularity down to the the minute. i.e. to...
Great! I know this project must be a fair bit of work for you, but I'll admit that one of the next thing I was looking for was a way to specify time granularity down to the the minute. i.e. to look at the positions of everything as of right now.
yeah that's a good idea. I'll think of how I can make this work without cluttering the UI too much (I hate cluttered UIs :D) I'm on it now. Will report back. Also thinking whether it's a good idea...
yeah that's a good idea. I'll think of how I can make this work without cluttering the UI too much (I hate cluttered UIs :D)
I'm on it now. Will report back.
Also thinking whether it's a good idea to remove the random background stars and go for an actual scape. There's so many things I find fascinating, and I could use this tool as a teaching/learning opportunity -> Including things like JWST observations, their systems (working on that too)
I also thought about generating planets in much more detail and adding a spaceship mode to fly around, but it's kind of the wrong direction I think
Just fyi, I am working on that. I just have a lot of changes locally and I want to make sure everything works before I push it. Also adding more learning features to it at the moment. I’m super...
Just fyi, I am working on that. I just have a lot of changes locally and I want to make sure everything works before I push it. Also adding more learning features to it at the moment. I’m super happy for all the feedback and encouragement I am getting.
Can share a beta test link once I feel confident enough in it
Sweet! I don't know a ton about astronomy, but the one issue I noticed is that the moon doesn't appear to be tidally locked to Earth. Maybe it's rotating in the wrong direction?
Sweet! I don't know a ton about astronomy, but the one issue I noticed is that the moon doesn't appear to be tidally locked to Earth. Maybe it's rotating in the wrong direction?
That's really cool! It made me giggle that Earth's atmosphere is earth like. I assumed at first it was just a simulation of the solar system, which would be cool enough, the huge variety of...
That's really cool! It made me giggle that Earth's atmosphere is earth like. I assumed at first it was just a simulation of the solar system, which would be cool enough, the huge variety of scenarios and the sandbox capabilities is quite something!
I had some trouble with the spawning functionality. After the menu closes the step to click the position and orbit seems to glitch each time, sometimes responding to the previous click event and other times ending up being placed with a velocity that doesn't match the orbit preview at all. One time that led to the sun I was spawning launching into one of the planets and both of them exploding into particle clouds, which was pretty cool to see (though I also saw a planet pass through a star unharmed)
i'll re-check the spawning functionality. I am not 100% happy with it either, it's kind of a weird thing to make simple since you have so many degrees of freedom. Thank you for the feedback! The...
i'll re-check the spawning functionality. I am not 100% happy with it either, it's kind of a weird thing to make simple since you have so many degrees of freedom.
Thank you for the feedback!
The planets passing through stars - since it would be hard to see, the planets and stars are scaled by default, so things can pass through the apparent size, but the physics is based on the "real size"
I will test it more. The particle clouds are still very much work in progress. But I am quite happy with how it turns out.
I thank that will be very helpful for me. I wish to write somewhat realistic science fiction but I am not particularly talented at figures and science.
I thank that will be very helpful for me. I wish to write somewhat realistic science fiction but I am not particularly talented at figures and science.
Well I’m happy to add more info/maybe an advanced view, for your use case. I have added a new view in which you can basically watch the sky (at least the star and other planets) from another...
Well I’m happy to add more info/maybe an advanced view, for your use case. I have added a new view in which you can basically watch the sky (at least the star and other planets) from another planet. And I’ve been quite happy with how the sizes work (https://bsky.app/profile/watermelonson.com/post/3mghnezi3ps2e)
I’m gonna look into building custom scenarios too. Looking atmosphere scattering too.
This feature is not pushed yet I think. I might push it later today though.
That is great. There is one specific image I have in my mind of an enormous spaceship approaching Earth, and I wish to narrate precisely what it would look like for someone on Earth looking up and...
Well I’m happy to add more info/maybe an advanced view, for your use case. I have added a new view in which you can basically watch the sky
That is great. There is one specific image I have in my mind of an enormous spaceship approaching Earth, and I wish to narrate precisely what it would look like for someone on Earth looking up and noticing specific stars being obscured. It's the kind of detail that probably only matters to me, but I do believe that kind of thing adds a lot to a story in some way.
I do have most of the functions available for something like that. I do not have all the stars in it yet, only an image of the Milky Way (that I still have to fact check a bit if it’s rotated...
I do have most of the functions available for something like that. I do not have all the stars in it yet, only an image of the Milky Way (that I still have to fact check a bit if it’s rotated right) - I feel like that might be a really good base though.
I’ll keep it in mind. I have a few higher priority things at this moment (want to put it in the app and play store, but I keep working on features)
https://luna.watermelonson.com/?preset=kepler-16 Check out the “sky view” This is a binary star system with a circumbinary planet. I find it so cool to see how the stars would move along the sky.
Fascinating! Really cool how easy navigation is. Is the tilt/texture on Earth realistic? looks a lot more than 6 degrees--or maybe my reference point is wrong
Fascinating! Really cool how easy navigation is.
Is the tilt/texture on Earth realistic? looks a lot more than 6 degrees--or maybe my reference point is wrong
You are not alone. A colleague recently asked me about how much time a geostationary satellite would spend eclipsed by the earth during the night. When I said practically none, he thought I had...
You are not alone. A colleague recently asked me about how much time a geostationary satellite would spend eclipsed by the earth during the night. When I said practically none, he thought I had over-estimated the size of the geostationary orbit. Then he also had to look up the angle to convince himself that, yes in fact, geostationary satellites spend vanishingly small amounts of time, if any, in earths shadow, due to that high angle.
Edit: I think the confusion comes from the inclination of Earth's orbit relative to the Sun's equator of 7.15°.
This is really cool, great job! Minor UX bug - while placing a planet if you hold down mouse button and drag and get the green arrow and then press esc, it stops the placing action but the arrow...
This is really cool, great job!
Minor UX bug - while placing a planet if you hold down mouse button and drag and get the green arrow and then press esc, it stops the placing action but the arrow remains.
What do the coloured rings represent? Earth seems to track the green one more or less (I would have expected blue for Earth! :)) but the red one closer to the sun is between Venus and Mercury.
And what's the scale like? I was impressed by the distance to Neptune for example, that's great to see that, but then Mercury is much closer to the sun than it should be? Are the distances simply scaled and in reality Neptune would be even further away?
The colored rings are the habitable zones. I’ll see if I can make it clearer. And the scale is for visual effect. I should explain to too. In the settings menu there is an option to change the...
The colored rings are the habitable zones. I’ll see if I can make it clearer.
And the scale is for visual effect. I should explain to too. In the settings menu there is an option to change the scale to a more realistic one. I’ll think of a way to add that to the tutorial since both are important to note. Thank you!
Bumping this because there's been a lot of new additions since I posted this. First of all: there's been so much positive feedback. Lot's of people have shared it. At the start I was super happy...
Bumping this because there's been a lot of new additions since I posted this.
First of all: there's been so much positive feedback. Lot's of people have shared it. At the start I was super happy to see 10-100 daily users. It is at like 1-3k daily users now most of the time.
and since today: JSON mode. I have an AI chat in there (using free openrouter models) to help you generate some, but you can also modify the JSON fully to have your own scenario. I have a prompt in there so that you can interactively generate a scenario if you don't know anything about JSON too.
Feedback of the tool shows me that a lot of users learn about the tool in school, which is amazing to see too.
I appreciate all the feedback I have gotten here, so any more feature requests are welcome!
I'd like to report a bug that violently ramming about 13 maximum-size gas giants into the center of the Solar System crashes this simulator. But Earth was still like 45% habitable, so we've got that going for us
That’s really funny. I’ll have to check out what caused that. I’m happy so many people enjoy it
This is really an accomplishment. I don't think I ever predicted that I would be able to play Universe Sandbox on a mobile phone. This is going to be a wonderful teaching tool.
One of my personal hobby horses is the Gaian Bottleneck hypothesis and how, unfortunately, stellar evolution proceeds much faster than biological evolution. As a result, stars move their Goldilocks Zones faster than life can evolve, adapt, or respond beyond early stages. The reason that we exist at all to have this conversation is more a matter of speculation, rather than settled science.
You have a habitability index on your app. Stellar evolution is slow on human time scales. What if you gave the user the ability to shift time forward and see how a star will evolve in 500 million or a billion years and how that will change habitability on a planet?
Thank you so much for the kind words. I love the feature idea, I’ll look into it and I’ll let you know how it goes. It definitely sounds doable. the habitability simulation is also something I want to learn more about as I go, since I find the topic fascinating!
Ha, what a fun simulator. I spawned a planet between Mars and Jupitor... Io and Europa got jealous and broke away from Jupitor at some point. They've been hanging close but not too close.
Then I spawned a massive gas giant between Neptune and Uranus. Neptune butted heads a couple times with the newbie then left the system for a while. Uranus just did a spin around it and launched a bit behind Neptune. They eventually came back only to get scared and left again.
Finally, placing the biggest gas giant right around mercury's orbit with the arrow pointed out and time set to year/s made for a neat pattern. It apparently dragged the sun with it as it spun creating increasingly intricate patterns. I had set it to green, it's now black. My goal was a black hole... did I succeed? :D Oh wait no, if I center on it instead of the sun the green comes back. Just added a couple more to it... wow the patterns are neat!.... Oh no the sun just got launched! It's disasterous, the green gas giant went one way and the sun and new gas giant went the other, the center of the solar system now stands empty! Planets are shooting off in straight lines.
Hehehe, destroyed the solar system, 5 stars from me! :D
Feel free to try it and let me know what you think.
It's kind of a universe sandbox running in the browser. I've been working on this for a while now.
You can replace/spawn planets/stars
generate random systems
and now you can also watch particle simulations. I'm working on getting collisions to work, and in the meantime you can watch the accretion disk or nebula do it's thing.
There's also a few creative aspects: you can draw dust and watch the particles move.
Here's some videos of it in action: https://bsky.app/profile/watermelonson.com/post/3mflhso5t5c2r
Looks interesting! Steps 3-7 in the tutorial don't recognize when I have done the requested action, so I have to manually skip to the next step each time.
thanks for the feedback. I'll try to fix it asap. Worked so much on other stuff that I must have missed some things there.
Well done. I think a neat feature would be to show our solar system at the current datetime, maybe updating in real time. Then, also allow travelling around to an arbitrary datetime in history, or the future, and playing from there. I also noticed Earth's moon repeatedly causing a solar eclipse, heh.
try it out now. The simulation now starts with our current alignment.
I also love that I can now go back and look at solar eclipses. Added a 10 minute per second mode now too, to look at things in detail. Still seeing some bugs, but I could see the solar eclipse 11 august 1999 - The trajectory is just not 100% there
Great! I know this project must be a fair bit of work for you, but I'll admit that one of the next thing I was looking for was a way to specify time granularity down to the the minute. i.e. to look at the positions of everything as of right now.
yeah that's a good idea. I'll think of how I can make this work without cluttering the UI too much (I hate cluttered UIs :D)
I'm on it now. Will report back.
Also thinking whether it's a good idea to remove the random background stars and go for an actual scape. There's so many things I find fascinating, and I could use this tool as a teaching/learning opportunity -> Including things like JWST observations, their systems (working on that too)
I also thought about generating planets in much more detail and adding a spaceship mode to fly around, but it's kind of the wrong direction I think
Just fyi, I am working on that. I just have a lot of changes locally and I want to make sure everything works before I push it. Also adding more learning features to it at the moment. I’m super happy for all the feedback and encouragement I am getting.
Can share a beta test link once I feel confident enough in it
Actually looking into that right now. And being able to go to a specific date.
Sweet! I don't know a ton about astronomy, but the one issue I noticed is that the moon doesn't appear to be tidally locked to Earth. Maybe it's rotating in the wrong direction?
Fun discovery: Going full screen (F11) was immersive.
That's really cool! It made me giggle that Earth's atmosphere is earth like. I assumed at first it was just a simulation of the solar system, which would be cool enough, the huge variety of scenarios and the sandbox capabilities is quite something!
I had some trouble with the spawning functionality. After the menu closes the step to click the position and orbit seems to glitch each time, sometimes responding to the previous click event and other times ending up being placed with a velocity that doesn't match the orbit preview at all. One time that led to the sun I was spawning launching into one of the planets and both of them exploding into particle clouds, which was pretty cool to see (though I also saw a planet pass through a star unharmed)
i'll re-check the spawning functionality. I am not 100% happy with it either, it's kind of a weird thing to make simple since you have so many degrees of freedom.
Thank you for the feedback!
The planets passing through stars - since it would be hard to see, the planets and stars are scaled by default, so things can pass through the apparent size, but the physics is based on the "real size"
I will test it more. The particle clouds are still very much work in progress. But I am quite happy with how it turns out.
I thank that will be very helpful for me. I wish to write somewhat realistic science fiction but I am not particularly talented at figures and science.
Well I’m happy to add more info/maybe an advanced view, for your use case. I have added a new view in which you can basically watch the sky (at least the star and other planets) from another planet. And I’ve been quite happy with how the sizes work (https://bsky.app/profile/watermelonson.com/post/3mghnezi3ps2e)
I’m gonna look into building custom scenarios too. Looking atmosphere scattering too.
This feature is not pushed yet I think. I might push it later today though.
That is great. There is one specific image I have in my mind of an enormous spaceship approaching Earth, and I wish to narrate precisely what it would look like for someone on Earth looking up and noticing specific stars being obscured. It's the kind of detail that probably only matters to me, but I do believe that kind of thing adds a lot to a story in some way.
I do have most of the functions available for something like that. I do not have all the stars in it yet, only an image of the Milky Way (that I still have to fact check a bit if it’s rotated right) - I feel like that might be a really good base though.
I’ll keep it in mind. I have a few higher priority things at this moment (want to put it in the app and play store, but I keep working on features)
https://luna.watermelonson.com/?preset=kepler-16
Check out the “sky view”
This is a binary star system with a circumbinary planet. I find it so cool to see how the stars would move along the sky.
Fascinating! Really cool how easy navigation is.
Is the tilt/texture on Earth realistic? looks a lot more than 6 degrees--or maybe my reference point is wrong
You are not alone. A colleague recently asked me about how much time a geostationary satellite would spend eclipsed by the earth during the night. When I said practically none, he thought I had over-estimated the size of the geostationary orbit. Then he also had to look up the angle to convince himself that, yes in fact, geostationary satellites spend vanishingly small amounts of time, if any, in earths shadow, due to that high angle.
Edit: I think the confusion comes from the inclination of Earth's orbit relative to the Sun's equator of 7.15°.
The earths tilt is about 23.5 degrees!
I'm glad you like the tool
This is really cool, great job!
Minor UX bug - while placing a planet if you hold down mouse button and drag and get the green arrow and then press esc, it stops the placing action but the arrow remains.
What do the coloured rings represent? Earth seems to track the green one more or less (I would have expected blue for Earth! :)) but the red one closer to the sun is between Venus and Mercury.
And what's the scale like? I was impressed by the distance to Neptune for example, that's great to see that, but then Mercury is much closer to the sun than it should be? Are the distances simply scaled and in reality Neptune would be even further away?
The colored rings are the habitable zones. I’ll see if I can make it clearer.
And the scale is for visual effect. I should explain to too. In the settings menu there is an option to change the scale to a more realistic one. I’ll think of a way to add that to the tutorial since both are important to note. Thank you!
I’ll also rework the spawn mechanic
Bumping this because there's been a lot of new additions since I posted this.
First of all: there's been so much positive feedback. Lot's of people have shared it. At the start I was super happy to see 10-100 daily users. It is at like 1-3k daily users now most of the time.
In the last months there's been tons of performance improvements, and I am working on more scenarios. Some information about other realistic systems, rayleigh scattering - see the atmosphere on sunset on other planets, some more lessons, date navigation
and since today: JSON mode. I have an AI chat in there (using free openrouter models) to help you generate some, but you can also modify the JSON fully to have your own scenario. I have a prompt in there so that you can interactively generate a scenario if you don't know anything about JSON too.
Feedback of the tool shows me that a lot of users learn about the tool in school, which is amazing to see too.
I appreciate all the feedback I have gotten here, so any more feature requests are welcome!