The applet on this page illustrates two well-known and contrasting examples in orbital dynamics, the restricted three-body problem from celestial mechanics, and the Schwarzschild metric in general relativity.
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You should see a button to the left saying Show Orbits window. (If not, see here.) To download, see below. |
You can start an integration by clicking with the mouse within the curves in the right panel, which sets the initial conditions. If the orbit is unstable for whatever reason, the integrator will stop. Otherwise it will keep going until you click another orbit, or press pause.
The left panel shows the orbit itself, the right panel shows the surface of section.
The pull-down selector lets you change between the restricted three-body problem in rotating coordinates or barycentric coordinates, and Schwarzschild orbits. To change the energy, edit the text field and press enter. The mass ratio of 10:1 is hard-wired at the moment. The `strobe' field sets how finely the orbit gets plotted.
The program is written in literate Java and is free software. The source and Java byte code are all bundled in the Orbits.jar file.
You can run the program from a command line with
java -jar Orbits.jar
This also lets you save output to disk.