The Dynamical Astronomy JavaLab December 2018 Sadly, the browser-based Dynamical Astronomy JavaLab has been taken offline. When the JavaLab first came online in 1999, web browsers would happily run java applets, but heightened security concerns have made modern browsers much more restrictive, to the point where the applets no longer run in the browser at all. As a result, the JavaLab is non-functional as a web-based toolbox, and so I have taken the site down. However, I am making the applets available for download. They can be run locally if you have Sun's appletviewer installed on your system. And if you warent to hack code, the code is available as well (although you should realize most of these applets were written 20 years ago by student programmers, and so the coding standards will be very dated and... non-standard). The list of applets and downloadable links is given below. Each archive is a gzipped tar file containing two subdirectories: one containing the applet itself (both source and class files, usually contained in a single jar file), and the other containing the explanatory web pages that supported the applet. Applet list: GalCrash: simulate galaxy collisions SOS: a "surface of section" modeling tool to study stellar orbits in galactic potentials RotCurve: modeling galaxy rotation curves (although note that Thomas Moore (Pomona College) has ported this applet to Javascript here. Moons: using the Galilean moons to measure the mass of Jupiter Cosmo: plotting the size and age of the universe for different cosmological parameters Cannibal: studying the tidal evolution of satellite galaxies Clusters: using galaxy kinematics to measure the mass of galaxy clusters Voyages: calculating spacecraft orbits in the solar system You are welcome to use the applet source code to redesign or update the applets. However if you do so, please let me know. And if you then publicly host those tools on your own site, please also give appropriate credit to our original project. Much appreciation goes out to all the student programmers who worked on the JavaLab, as well as to the National Science Foundation and Case Western Reserve University, both of whom provided funding to support the project all those many years ago.... Chris Mihos (mihos@case.edu) Department of Astronomy Case Western Reserve University
