Gravity Animation

This animation shows motion produced by setting intial positions and velocities of two bodies and then letting gravity do the rest. The objects were defined thusly:

• object 1
  • mass: 1.0x10**13
  • radius: 60
  • initial position: 0 0 0
  • initial velocity: 0 0 0
• object 2
  • mass: 1.0x10**11
  • radius: 30
  • initial position: 400 -200 0
  • initial velocity: -1.5 -0.125 0

The gravitational constant of G = 6.67x10**-11 was used. The animation was viewed from (0 0 400). 500 time slices were computed with every tenth time slice displayed (i.e., ten samples per frame). The motion was produced by, for each time slice for both objects, updating the force, computing acceleration, calulating average velocity, updating position, and then updating velocity.