Gravitorium - Gravitorium Web Site

Gravitorium

A program for fun and education to simulate the movement of stars, planets and other bodies under Newtonian gravitation.

The prime purpose of Gravitorium is to let you play with ideas about gravity and gravitational systems. While it's not intended to be a highly accurate solar system simulator, at low speeds its accuracy is really pretty good, at least for modest periods of time (a hundred years or so). It is certainly good enough to get a good general impression of the likely course of events in a particular planetary system. And, best of all, it lets you "play universe creator". Throw in a few extra planets, add a black hole, set a comet plunging towards the Earth! Or create an entirely new solar system from scratch.

Educators should find it a very useful tool for teaching physics and astronomy.

There are two versions of this program:

The shareware version, which I'm now calling Gravitorium Pro. This version has many, many enhancements over the freeware version (discussed below), including:

Far fewer bugs!
Much faster simulation
Zoom and shift features
The ability to record snapshots of long simulations
Improved user interface
A sophisticated New System Wizard which makes it very easy to create a new solar system and add bodies like stars, planets, moons, asteroids, comets and spacecraft
The ability to apply boosts of acceleration to objects like spacecraft
Capture images of the simulation to .bmp files
...and lots of other stuff.

The freeware version, let's call it Gravitorium Lite, which is the first version I released, a couple of years ago. It remains as freeware but you are strongly encouraged to upgrade to Gravitorium Pro, which is shareware (at a very modest price).

Your choices:

Click here to download Gravitorium Pro. You can try out this version with no limitations on functionality for a period of 21 days.
Click here to purchase and register the program.
Click here for detailed information about using Gravitorium Pro. (This is the program's help file)
Click here for the Gravitorium Pro version history.
Click here to download Gravitorium Lite. No questions asked, but sorry, no technical support for this version.

Acknowledgements: Gravitorium was mainly written in Microsoft Visual Basic 6, with some components in Borland Delphi. The lovely graphics of planets and stars were created using Universe, a wonderful little program from Diard Software.