Universe Sandbox

Universe Sandbox

Binary planets don't seem to be working
I terraformed the moon, gave it the same mass, density and size of the earth, and when I try to make it binary with the earth, it doesn't work. It just says "planet orbiting sun" on both of them.

It doesn't matter if they are closer than normal, if I spawn in the regular moon first and replace it with the new one, or If I make a normal orbit or a binary one. As long as the earth is in motion, there can never be a binary planet system.

They just end up at opposite sides of the sun at some point. Having a binary star system with two suns works fine, as the first sun isn't in motion when the simulation starts.
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bshapiroalbert  [developer] 30 Oct @ 8:02am 
Thanks for asking about this. I was able to create a binary system between Earth and the Moon by doing the following:
1. Adding the Moon orbiting around Earth
2. Pausing the simulation
3. Increasing the Moons mass to be equal to Earth's
4. The Moon is still listed as orbiting Earth, so I went to the Moon's Motion tab, set the Eccentricity to 0, and then locked the Eccentricity
5. Adjusted the Semi-major axis to the desired value
6. Selected both the Earth and Moon and created a Barycenter, then focused the camera on that Barycenter

Played the simulation at a couple hours/second. This system was stable up to a few months/second.

However, since both the Moon and Earth are orbiting the Sun and the Sun has the greatest gravitational attraction to both the Earth and Moon, they will both be listed as planets orbiting the Sun.

We're working on some improvements to our orbit system and the way you can adjust orbital parameters that should make it easier to create binary systems like this in the next update.
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