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Author Topic: Moons formed from collision debris, rings....  (Read 3254 times)

wulfman

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Moons formed from collision debris, rings....
« on: September 13, 2014, 06:28:13 AM »
Just got the Alpha on Steam, and I'm loving the new features so far. Collisions look really cool and I love how the climate changes from them too. However, after colliding Mars with the Earth one time to simulate a certain event 3.5 odd billion years ago (take a guess :)), I noticed something. Although a lot of debris was ejected from the impact and some went into a fairly stable orbit around the battered Earth, the orbits stayed random and all that remained was just a couple planetoid fragments other than Earth, no rings or anything.

If you've been reading up on prehistory, you'll know that when Earth collided with the planetoid when it was being formed, the debris formed a ring, and eventually that collected into a moon. Is it possible for this to be simulated on Universe Sandbox?

Thanks. :)

Unnamed25

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Re: Moons formed from collision debris, rings....
« Reply #1 on: September 13, 2014, 06:52:59 AM »
Sometimes fragments end up orbiting a planet, they cool down, and if they are large enough they turn into moons/dwarf planets

No rings from collisions yet though.

Xriqxa

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Re: Moons formed from collision debris, rings....
« Reply #2 on: September 13, 2014, 08:22:41 AM »
Well, not enough particles are formed from collisions to make rings, and particles in Universe Sandbox don't have their own gravity, so unfortunately they can't attract other particles to create rings.

thalamus

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Re: Moons formed from collision debris, rings....
« Reply #3 on: September 13, 2014, 09:29:25 AM »
Like Unnamed25 said, the odds of forming a decent ring from a collision are poor, but the odds of forming a moon, I'd say, are pretty good: if the collision hits just right, you'll get a bunch of Earth Fragments or Impactor Fragments in orbit, and I'm pretty sure they become gravitating objects in their own right, so if everything works out, they could coalesce and form a moon.

Also, there's been talk that a future update to US2 will include the ability to run Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics simulations, which are the same kind of simulations they use to simulate actual moon-forming collisions. Which would be awesome.

Shiranui

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Re: Moons formed from collision debris, rings....
« Reply #4 on: September 13, 2014, 03:36:48 PM »
As thalamus said, SPH for UB2 is in the works. This is what it looks like:
http://youtu.be/dajIf1BHq48?list=UUA4DuNG1K7AD79qnq_H08zA
 ;)