Dominic Oram's gravitational interaction program

*Update to Open Evening comment: Dom Oram is did his presentation on a computer simulation of gravitational bodies today… It was excellent, as we knew it would be!




One of great interest to young students was a program written in C++ from scratch by Dominic Oram, currently yr 13, a former GCSE astronomy student.

The program, created as part of an Extended Project scheme, modelled the gravitational interaction between stars and planets. You could change the number of stars/planets (as long as it was less than 200!), each planet’s properties, how much light the stars gave off and see the objects with reflected light.

The variables that can be changed on each planet include: spin, mass, size and colour, including the surface texture. The colourful and informative interactive program showed how these changes would affect the orbits of planets around each other. Though already very advanced, the program is still in development, and Dominic is hoping to add further improvements. For example, a simulation of the heat the star creates and so the temperature of each planet orbiting the star.

Dom working on his program