Display vectors: Display values:
The units in the animation are Giga-meters, kg, and days. Each grid is 10 Giga-meters, and each time step is one day. The default radii correspond approximately to the orbits of Earth and Mars. Click on a point in the animation to display the x and y coordinates. In the vector displays, the vector components are blue arrows, while the resultant vector is displayed in red.
The central mass is that of the sun. Newton's law is integrated numerically by a Runge-Kutta algorithm for each of the three objects (which interact only with the sun, not with each other).
By Robert Johnson, using the Physlet Animator and dataGraph classes from Wolfgang Christian and Mario Belloni.