Display vectors: Display values:
The units in the animation are MKS (meters, kilograms, and seconds). 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 an arbitrary large value chosen for convenience. 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.