If your're talking about the universe, then that's general relaticity. But Dan's original question asked about galaxies. The motion of stars in a galaxy is nonrelativistic, except near the central black hole, if there is one. Computer calculations of millions of stars do show the galaxy evolving into shapes that are similar to those that are observed. --- Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> wrote:
Yes, but is this _Newtonian_ mechanics & gravity? Most astronomers that I know want to know about the real (relativistic) universe, not the Newtonian universe. Most of the articles I've seen recently appear to have relativistic mechanics built in.
At 04:40 PM 6/27/03 -0700, Eugene Salamin wrote:
The answer is "yes" to both questions. This has been around for years in the computational physics/astronomy journals.
--- asimovd@aol.com wrote:
I am curious whether anyone has done large-scale simulations of point masses in 3-space with random initial positions and velocities, under Newtonian mechanics & gravity.
I'm especially curious whether that's enough for galaxy-shaped objects to appear.
--Dan
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