During my PhD, I played a lot with simulating binary stars, and to assist in preaching the Binary Stars Are Cool gospel, made a tool to visualise their evolution. It’s essentially a Unity wrapper which takes user input, runs binary_c in the background, then parses its output to show how the stars evolve over the course of 15 billion years.
Here’s a quick demo so you can see what it actually does:
While there’s no public download link at the moment, if you’re interested in using or playing around with Hyperion, get in touch (via tom @ [this website]) and I can send you a copy. We’ve got it working without too much trouble on Linux machines – while it should be feasible to get it running on other OSs, I can’t make any guarantees.
If (like me) you think a lot about where words come from, you may be wondering “why Hyperion?” There are two reasons: first, I’m pretty sure that Greek-derived names automatically sound good. Second, I was pretty sure that ‘hyperion’ meant ‘watching from above’. Apparently it doesn’t, but the name is stuck now.