Simulations & Animations Gallery

It Takes (More Than) Two to Tango

What happens to a star system's planets after it becomes a neutron star (provided they even survive the blast)? In this simulation, we look at a "dance" involving two neutron stars and a gas giant planet (like Jupiter or Saturn).

One neutron star is orbited by the planet, but there's a second neutron star lurking nearby acting as a "perturber." This setup triggers something called Lidov-Kozai cycles: the outer neutron star's gravity constantly tugs on the planet, causing its orbit to stretch and tilt wildly.

Eventually, the orbit becomes so eccentric (meaning its path is very elongated) that the planet is practically thrown into its host neutron star. This collision completely destroys the planet, and could be the very origin of the accretion disks we observe around neutron stars!

Honestly, the Moon Had It Coming

What would happen if the Moon suddenly shattered into pieces? In this simulation, we explore just that: the opening catastrophe of Neal Stephenson's science fiction novel Seveneves.

In the book, the Moon breaks apart for reasons unknown, sending its fragments into a slow, chaotic gravitational orbit around Earth. Here, we model seven fragments of roughly equal mass, each with a slightly different velocity from the breakup and settling into its own distinct orbit.

Over time, the fragments interact with one another gravitationally, nudging, stretching, and tilting each other's paths. This kind of multi-body gravitational interaction is notoriously unpredictable: small differences in starting conditions can lead to wildly different outcomes.

In the novel, this fragmentation eventually triggers a "Hard Rain", from a chain of collisions between the fragments that fills Earth's sky with debris, rendering the surface uninhabitable for thousands of years. The fate of humanity then depends on what can be saved... in orbit.

The Rössler Attractor

The Rössler attractor is a beautiful example of how simple rules can produce unpredictable complexity, which is the basic idea behind chaos theory. It's described by just three very simple equations (two of which are fully linear) which determine how a point moves through space.

The attractor itself looks a bit like a twisted ribbon, or a warped vinyl record with one edge curled up. Trajectories move smoothly around the flat part, then occasionally get shot upward and folded back down.

If you track a point over time, it never repeats the same path. It loops, spirals, and sometimes jumps in a new direction, and loops again, forever, without ever quite retracing its steps.

Quantum Tunneling

Quantum tunneling is one of the most counterintuitive phenomena in physics: a particle can pass through a potential energy barrier even when it lacks the classical energy to do so. In classical mechanics, a ball rolling toward a hill it cannot climb simply bounces back. However, in quantum mechanics particles are described by wavefunctions, meaning a probability amplitude spread across space, and a portion of that wavefunction can "leak" through the barrier, giving the particle a non-zero probability of appearing on the other side.

This animation shows exactly that: a Gaussian wave packet colliding with a rectangular barrier, splitting into a reflected component and a transmitted component that tunnels through.

Quantum tunneling is responsible for nuclear fusion in stars, radioactive alpha decay, the operation of tunnel diodes, the scanning tunneling microscope that lets us image individual atoms, and even some biological processes in the human body.