The Dynamical Astronomy JavaLab
December 2018
Sadly, the browser-based Dynamical Astronomy JavaLab has been taken
offline.
When the JavaLab first came online in 1999, web browsers would happily
run java applets, but heightened security concerns have made modern
browsers much more restrictive, to the point where the applets no
longer run in the browser at all. As a result, the JavaLab is
non-functional as a
web-based toolbox, and so I have taken the site down.
However, I am making the applets available for download. They can be
run locally if you have Sun's appletviewer installed on your system.
And if you warent to hack code, the code is available as well (although
you should realize most of these applets were written 20 years ago by
student programmers, and so the coding standards will be very dated and...
non-standard).
The list of applets and downloadable links is given below. Each archive
is a gzipped tar file containing two subdirectories: one containing the
applet itself
(both source and class files, usually contained in a single jar file),
and the other containing the explanatory web pages that supported the
applet.
Applet list:
- GalCrash: simulate galaxy collisions
- SOS: a "surface of section" modeling
tool to study stellar orbits in galactic potentials
- RotCurve: modeling galaxy rotation
curves (although note that Thomas Moore (Pomona College) has ported this applet
to Javascript here.
- Moons: using the Galilean moons to
measure the mass of Jupiter
- Cosmo: plotting the size and age of
the universe for different cosmological parameters
- Cannibal: studying the tidal
evolution of satellite galaxies
- Clusters: using galaxy kinematics
to measure the mass of galaxy clusters
- Voyages: calculating spacecraft
orbits in the solar system
You are welcome to use the applet source code to redesign or update the
applets. However if you do so, please let me know. And if you then publicly
host those tools on your own site, please also give appropriate credit to our original
project.
Much appreciation goes out to all the student programmers who worked on
the JavaLab, as well as to the National Science
Foundation and Case Western Reserve University, both of whom provided
funding to support the project all those many years ago....
Chris Mihos (mihos@case.edu)
Department of Astronomy
Case Western Reserve University