Newtonian Gravity with Velocity Verlet and OpenGL (2016)

The subject is a very simple molecular dynamics program that simulates a solar system using Newtonian mechanics and the Newtonian law of universal gravitation, that is, an N-Body simulator (more specifically, a direct N-body simulation). Molecular dynamics is basically this: you have a bunch of ‘particles’ in a physical system, you know the initial state which is given by all the particle positions and momenta, or in the simple cases when the mass of particles stays unchanged as known in the beginning, their velocities. In other cases it might be simpler, when there is screening and/or the range of the interaction is limited one could consider only the neighbors of a ‘particle’ for interactions, using neighbors lists that are updated once in a while after performing many time steps in the simulation.

Source: compphys.go.ro