Glad that you (Darvince and Cryo) enjoy my "star-grumbles".... I am honored.... <humbly bows> Way I see it, Universe Sandbox is tragically miscategorized as a "game". It isn't. It's an advanced scientific and astronomical simulator--it is a tool and could very well be used in training and in the classroom, just as Microsoft's Flight Simulator is often used in training new pilots. I am hoping that the nice folks at Giant Army will choose to market it in this way, as well as as a game (They shouldn't give up the 'game' angle, as that would eliminate a large chunk of their potential audience)--they should just ADD the educational/research angle as well as there is so much to be learned through this program). I am, therefore, being a grumbling PITA because I want Giant Army to extend and expand upon the accuracy of this fantastic tool so that it ever more realistically (within the constraints of current home computer technology) depict stars, planets and other items in outer space. I'd just as happily see less focus on dramatic explosions and more on stellar dynamics, planetary evolution given changes in environment, temperature, distance from sun(s), etc.)
Indeed, it was through the use of this program that I learned that an earthlike world orbiting within the habitable zone of a red dwarf sun is extremely unlikely to be have any moons, as well as that an earthlike world orbiting a blue giant would have to be so far away from its primary that such a world's sun would appear to be just a tiny, extremely bright, 'star' in the sky.
Such fascinating discoveries lead to further research that made me realize that the sky of a world orbiting that red dwarf would almost certainly be a pinkish orange, rather than blue, and that plants on the surface of that world would probably appear black to us, rather than green.
Another interesting thought is that large main-sequence stars (stars above that 1.5 solar mass/mid-F boundary), where fusion takes place in their cores mainly through the CNO process rather than the triple-alpha process (as seen in the sun and smaller stars) tend to last only a billion or two years, (for the smaller ones) and only a few tens or hundreds of millions of years for the largest ones. It is not very likely that worlds orbiting such stars, if any even formed amidst such prodigious stellar winds, would have time to evolve to the point of being able to support any kind of life beyond the most primitive of bacteria, if even that, before their suns aged to the point of supernova.
It's all quite fascinating, isn't it?
Topic: Will UBox2 ever have active depiction of stellar structure/internal dynamics? (Read 5148 times)