Planetary Heist
swainlekha25
A Newtonian N-body simulation where gravity can steal a planet from one star and capture it around another.
What it does
Planetary Heist simulates two planetary systems undergoing a close stellar encounter using Newtonian N-body gravity. Every star and planet interacts gravitationally with every other body, and their motion emerges from numerical integration rather than scripted trajectories. During the encounter, Planet A2 can be strongly perturbed, escape its original star, and become gravitationally bound to the other star. The simulation uses pairwise specific orbital energy and persistent binding diagnostics to identify the transition from bound to escaping to captured. Numerical verification also checks conservation and timestep robustness.