Gravity
Interactive solar-system simulator, from Newton to Einstein
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Just for fun and self education, I've built this over a weekend to teach myself why orbits exist, not just show planets going around. Something that was never clearly explain to me in school. It opens with a guided tour that builds the idea up step by step: two bodies and the equal/opposite force, inertia (the Sun is removed and Earth just drifts straight), then "an orbit is falling and continuously missing," cosmic velocities with a little rocket, Voyager 1 & 2's real gravity assists (the clock runs the actual 1977–1989 dates so the planets orbit into their grand-tour alignment and the slingshots line up), and it ends on Einstein — gravity as curved spacetime, the classic rubber-sheet well. What's real: every body uses its real radius/mass and J2000 orbital elements; positions come from solving Kepler's equation each frame. You can toggle to an N-body mode (symplectic leapfrog) that shows live energy drift (~1e-6%) so you can see the integrator is honest. The only thing faked is scale — at true scale you can't see anything — so there's a toggle between true scale and a log-remapped "visual" scale, with physics always running in real AU. Tech: TypeScript + Three.js + Vite, fully client-side, no backend, works offline (surface textures are generated procedurally from value-noise; only Earth uses a real image). Source: https://github.com/qunabu/GravityHappy to answer questions — and feedback on the physics or the explanations is very welcome. This project might be totally inaccurate in terms of real physics, this is how i do understand this on my own - i'm happy to confront this with reality
HN · launched Jun 9, 2026 · 217 upvotes (top 3%) · 0 views
Niche: physics and engineering simulation software · 104 launches, 8 in the last 7 days ▲ +14% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Education
- Dev tools
- B2C
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 104 launches in physics and engineering simulation software →
Could you build this?
Yes An educational N-body and orbital simulation in the browser using HTML5 Canvas or Three.js can easily be generated and guided step-by-step with an AI assistant.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: ElevenLabs
Concerns raised: AI narrator struggles with reading numbers and mathematical notation, Planet selection sometimes shows wrong planet, Performance impact on older devices from planet texture generation, Moon orbit physics not accurate to real subtle motion around Earth, Moon not tidally locked to Earth in visualization
Feature requests: More camera freedom when exploring individual planets, Show Earth rotation during planet formation rather than static image, Keep Next/Back buttons at fixed locations instead of moving, Model satellite launches and Artemis missions, Include black holes at galaxy centers
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 324 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #17 of 325 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 221 days after the earliest competitor.
- Rocket Launch and Orbit Simulator · hn · 2026-01-09 · 166 upvotes · similarity 0.64
- I built a space travel calculator using Vanilla JavaScript · hn · 2026-01-24 · 54 upvotes · similarity 0.59
- Newton's Orchard · hn · 2026-09-01 · 32 upvotes · similarity 0.59
- farseer.space · hn · 2026-09-15 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.58
- A solar system simulation in the browser · hn · 2025-12-29 · 13 upvotes · similarity 0.57
- SOLAR · ph · 2026-09-25 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.57
- A gravity simulator where forces propagate at the speed of light · hn · 2026-09-03 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.56
- A browser game where you navigate home to Earth using pulsars · hn · 2026-11-01 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.55
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