PlanetTXT: A Text-based Planetary System Simulation Interface for Astronomy Edutainment

Abstract

Planetary systems represent a set of gravitationally bounded non-stellar objects in or out of orbit around a star or star system. However, existing works for simulating exoplanetary systems other than the solar system are still limited. In this paper, we propose PlanetTXT, a plain text-based planetary system simulation interface for astronomy edutainment purposes. Using PlanetTXT, users can write simple scripts like C programming language to describe the astronomic parameters for an arbitrary planetary system. After putting this script into the interpreter implemented by us, the 3D virtual planetary system simulator is recursively constructed and automatically loaded in the Unity 3D Editor so that the user can view this planetary system simulation in an immersive virtual environment. In the end, we systematically test the capability of the PlanetTXT interface through a group of experiments, the results show that the PlanetTXT interface is good at simulating different planetary systems such as the solar systems, the Kepler systems, and some other exoplanetary systems.