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galaxy |
| version 1.8 |
| About galaxy |
Galaxy is a stellar motion simulator which can show the development of a random field of stars into patterns such as clusters and spiral arms.
Galaxy is a free Linux computer program which simulates the motion of stars under the influence of gravity. Create a field of random stars to begin with, then watch the stars move as they are accelerated by their mutual gravitational attractions. You can vary the number of stars, their initial velocities around a center, and the strength of the attractive force between them. Watch how the attractive forces accelerate individual stars and send them careening in new directions. Watch how large groups of stars develop into interesting patterns over time, such as clusters and spiral arms.
Galaxy is not for serious physics, but more a toy or educational aid for young students of science.
Requirements
This application requires GTK+ version 2.8.x.
Other dependencies include:
Standard Gnome GTK application. g++ and libgtk2-dev needed to build from source.
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| Latest Version: 1.8 |
Galaxy v.1.7 started showing stability problems, possibly because (on a Core i7 processor) it can generate >10K GTK calls per second. For galaxy v.1.8, all GTK (graphics) calls were removed from threads and consolidated in main(). This also reduced the graphics update rate. I ran it for 40 min. with 20K stars and 8 threads. CPU temp. reached 78C.
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