AstroGrav 1.8.3 - Study motion of astronomical objects and interaction with gravity. (Shareware)
A wide variety of sample files are provided, including Solar System, space mission, and abstract systems, and these enable you to experiment with AstroGrav without having to go to the trouble of entering your own data. The comprehensive editing facilities allow you to either create your own astronomical systems, or to modify existing ones, and provide you with an almost endless scope for experimentation and investigation.
AstroGrav can be used to visualize and understand the following aspects of gravitational and astronomical systems.
- Basic concepts of mass, position, velocity, acceleration, force, momentum, and energy.
- Kepler\'s Laws of Planetary Motion and Newton\'s Law of Universal Gravitation.
- Many body systems and the n-body problem.
- Orbits and Lagrange points.
- Interchange of potential energy and kinetic energy in gravitational systems.
- Projectiles and escape velocities.
- Gravitational slingshots used in space missions.
AstroGrav calculates how astronomical objects move according to Newton\'s Law of Universal Gravitation, and displays the results as they are calculated so that you can watch the system evolve as in a movie. AstroGrav is very accurate, dynamically calculates orbits as a system evolves, deals correctly with object collisions, and can cope simultaneously with objects on many different timescales.
AstroGrav is ideal for any of the following.
- Astronomers interested in studying the evolution of gravitational systems.
- Teachers and educationalists seeking to deliver courses on math, physics, or astronomy.
- Students of math, physics, or astronomy.
- Anyone else interested in studying how objects move and interact under the force of gravity.
Includes a re-design to the way that columns are shown and hidden in a table, with the following changes.
- The View / Show menu of a table window is now disabled (grayed out).
- The View / Show Tool Palette command of a table window is now disabled (grayed out).
- There is now a Column Selector () icon in the top-left corner of each table.
- When a table\'s Column Selector () icon is clicked, a menu pops up showing the eight items that used to be shown on the View / Show menu of a table window.
Other Improvements
- A new sample simulation has been added illustrating the system of exoplanets orbiting the star HD 10180.
- A bug has been fixed that could cause AstroGrav to crash on computers with Intel Core i7 processors.
- A bug has been fixed that caused the Edit / Units... command to not work on an object window.
- A bug has been fixed that caused structure nodes to fail to stay open during evolution when the Open Root Parent preference was selected.
- A bug has been fixed that caused a comet with more than one illuminator to be vastly brighter than it should be, have an incorrect phase, and have an incorrect color.
- A bug has been fixed that could cause a name to be displayed to the right of an object when it should have been displayed within the object.
- A bug has been fixed that caused the root of a structure to flip between objects when the the object masses were equal.
- Mac OS X 10.4 or later.
- 500MHz G3 or faster processor.