How the Solar System Formed

What it is

How the Solar System formed, from a collapsing cloud to the planets we have today, in thirteen plates styled after Trouvelot’s astronomical chromolithographs and the covers Hetzel printed for Jules Verne. Scroll to move through time, backwards as easily as forwards.

It says so on screen: a physically inspired simulation.

How it was made

The physics is baked in advance, in Node: eight simulations, each seeded so it replays identically. Sixty thousand tracers in the disk. A thirteen‑body run in which seven real mergers leave five planets. A giant impact, and a Moon gathering from the debris.

The browser plays them back in raw WebGL2, with no Three.js, and an SVG layer engraves on top: the orbits, the labels, the gilt type.

Every chapter lists what is computed and what is stylised, and the piece shows that list in its notes drawer. Uranus and Neptune, for instance, are three times too heavy, on purpose. Every claim on screen carries a science ID, checked against the papers before publishing, and the line style says how sure the science is: solid, dashed or dotted.

What I learned

Still frames lie. Every frame of the Moon chapter passed review. Played back, the Moon teleported and Theia simply vanished. That bought a second Moon, and a motion checker that hunts for jumps, strobes and pops.

The collapse runs from ten thousand astronomical units down to about two. Frames at a fixed rate would have needed tens of thousands of them, so every particle keeps its own keyframes.

Eighty‑eight bake tests pass. The run that failed nine of them stays in the record.

Credits

• Type: Bodoni Moda, IM Fell French Canon SC and EB Garamond (SIL Open Font License).
• Style references only, nothing copied: Trouvelot’s plates, Hetzel’s covers, Guillemin and Flammarion, the ALMA image of HL Tauri, JWST and Hubble.