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Super Planet Crash
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Here is an extremely addictive game: Super Planet Crash, a free online game designed by Stefano Meschiari, a researcher associated with the W. J. McDonald Observatory and the University of Chicago.
The objective is to build a planetary system resembling a solar system. The game accurately applies Newton's laws of gravity to the interactions between the central star and the bodies you place in orbit around it. Those bodies can include low-mass planets like Earth, massive planets like Jupiter, or even another companion star, such as a dwarf star.
Your goal is to fill the region within 2 astronomical units* of the central star with as many planets or stars as possible. The challenge is that your system must remain stable for 500 years: gravitational interactions must not destabilize any body and eject it beyond the two-AU boundary.
You can also begin with known planetary systems, including the compact Kepler-11 system.
Learning how to place objects in appropriate orbits demonstrates an important principle: for a stellar system to remain stable, its bodies need orbital configurations that remain dynamically stable throughout their paths. Each body's suitable orbit depends on its mass and its gravitational effects on the other objects. Bodies unable to remain stable in a particular system may be driven into very elongated elliptical orbits around the central star or even expelled from the system entirely.
At the time of writing, Stefano noted that extraordinary interest in the game had placed considerable traffic on his server, so score updates could be delayed. The game had also not yet been optimized for smartphone layouts, although it displayed very well on larger screens and tablets.
The original links to the game and additional information are preserved below. [source]
* In astronomy, one astronomical unit is the average distance between Earth and the Sun, approximately 150 million kilometres. [source] [source]
Warning: This is an addictive game. Sky and Weather accepts no responsibility for the loss of its readers' time—or lives—to it!