Dandelion: Star Clusters

A star cluster in the Galaxy's tidal field is a dandelion clock: two-body encounters slowly hand stars enough energy to drift past the Jacobi radius, where the Milky Way's tide plucks them away into two long tails of seeds.

Dandelion integrates this process on your device's GPU: a real, self-gravitating direct N-body simulation with the Galaxy's tidal field, stellar evolution, and tidal tails followed to kiloparsec distances. For the open-cluster presets, every point of light is one star.

WHAT'S REAL

• King, Plummer and EFF initial models, sampled from their distribution functions
• Kroupa and Salpeter initial mass functions
• Two-body relaxation, mass segregation, evaporation
• The exact differential Galactic tide, with no linearized approximation
• Stellar evolution: main-sequence lifetimes, red giants, white dwarfs, kicked neutron stars, black holes

WHAT'S NOT

• No binaries and no few-body regularization
• No molecular clouds, spiral arms or bar: real clusters near the Sun dissolve 3 to 5 times faster than the smooth tide alone The app admits its limits where they matter, in plain sight.

THIRTEEN CLUSTERS FROM THE LITERATURE Adopt the Hyades, the Pleiades, Praesepe, a scaled Pal 5 stream and nine more, each recreated from published parameters. Or build your own cluster and read an honest prognosis, relaxation time, Jacobi radius, dissolution estimate, before you release it to the wind.

WATCH, MEASURE, RIDE ALONG Fly through the cluster as it evolves at up to 20 million years per second. Reverse time. Track bound mass, radii, velocity dispersion and tail growth in seven live charts. Tap a star to see its mass, speed and fate, and ride along as the tide carries it down the tail.

Share any cluster as a link: same seed, same stars, on any device.

No accounts, no ads, no data collection.