ExoSim - Exoplanet Simulator (CWSF 2016)

WIP games, tools & toy projects
#1

(To the left is the runtime-manager window, then the two next to it is the galaxy and solar system, then the one to the far right is the planet with tracked moon orbits)

I’ve been working on this project for little under a year now, and I wanted to share it with JGO before my pre-regional fair on April 7th.
The abstract of this was to create a program for modelling and generating exoplanets for teachers, researchers and artists.

Here are some excerpts from the proposal:

An Exoplanet is any planet outside of our local solar system, although this project is primarily centralized around objects with organic life. This could mean anything from being close / far enough away from the star it’s orbiting (“The goldilocks zone”) or even that the planet contains the right elements to begin with. The goal of this project from the beginning was to create an accurate computer model of celestial bodies, systems orbiting in a galaxy, and many more things that contribute to the formation and maintenance of an exoplanet.

To do this we implemented many different “abstractions”, meaning different levels of complexity to our program. One example of these abstractions are planets in a solar system, orbiting their star. Then another abstraction lower will take you to the planet, and it’s moons. Having a very organized simulation like this allows you to only compute the necessities. The end game for the simulation is to create a map of the exoplanet and use that to understand what kind of life may be on that planet …

If anyone is interested in mentor-ship email me at mitchell.hynes@ecumene.xyz

#2

Almost forgot a link to the repository: https://bitbucket.org/ecumene/exosim
EDIT https://github.com/ecumene-software/java-exosim

#3

Cool. But your repository is missing the gradle/ directory which contains the Java Gradle wrapper, which the scripts gradlew and gradlew.bat at the top-level of your repository are trying to execute.
Cloning or zip-downloading your repository and invoking ‘gradlew’ results in Main class org.gradle.wrapper.GradleWrapperMain not found error.

#4

The project is really cool, I like it. I dug out into the sources and found something suspicious in the build script.


compile "org.lwjgl.lwjgl:lwjgl:${joglVersion}"

Why is the version named as [icode]joglVersion[/icode]? Of course that’s not important, but it still confused me.

Anyways, you’ve got a really cool project and that is what important.

#5

Because all the other dependencies had their versions with 4 letters and it’d break the consistency!

As for removing the gradle wrapper, herp derp, I’ll commit it again.

#6

I made some improvements and not gradle is officially working and can build the intellij forms correctly without you installing intellij.
I’ve also added a few features for creating Free Body Diagrams and visualising the dynamic component of any object in a simulation

Large version: http://i.imgur.com/danTfqd.png

Click Open in FBD Viewer to start a new FBD viewer for each simulation. So far solar-system objects along with galaxy solar systems can be viewed by pressing the button and you can get a real-time feed on the viewer by clicking ‘Update Every Frame’!

Right now I’m working on loading the Galaxy, Solar System, and Planets through XML objects in a directory, which could be used to re-enact many scenes from movies and real-life systems.
My plan is to display the black-hole flyby in interstellar and show the path too!

#7

The first round of judging for my regional science fair ended a while ago! It went really well and I believe we may have a chance at getting to nationals. If anyone wants to see the new repo use our github link https://github.com/ecumene-software/exosim

#8

Interesting project and quite ambitious. I would be interested in how you decide planet composition and things.

My masters was in Astrophysics (and laser physics). A few of my old friends work on planet formation theories, and stellar evolution along with nebular composition. Obviously recent data means these models are getting some adjustments.

I can see this working and being very interesting and super cool even with very cut down models and approximations. Note sure how you would do the biology however. That is far more speculative. Hell even weather systems are hard. It is quite easy to come up with a first order weather model that allows for liquid water outside the Goldilocks zone.

Interested in this and will watch this space.

#9

We won the IEEE award for demonstrating computer science although we lost a place in nationals. There were six people from our fair that were allowed to enter, 5 of which were in life sciences. (My category being in physical sciences)

#10

I’d prefer experience over awards. When you have a proper job the former is what matters.