Recent content by besjbo

No, nothing has changed, I've just put this assignment temporarily on the back-burner.

Those equations do not look familiar, but I'm admittedly a bit thrown off by the dots above some of your terms. I'm not sure what they represent. Nevertheless, I'm also not sure what the two forces represent. In notes I took when the problem was introduced, we were told the only two forces...

Would either of you be willing to grant me a concrete first step or two? I can't quite seem able to translate your descriptions into actual calculations, at least not with any confidence that I'm doing things the right way. Things are still quite cloudy, despite my efforts to understand them...

Wow, that does seem beyond what I think we would be expected to be able to do, and definitely beyond my capabilities.

I don't think it was. Perhaps there's some limitation of VPython that I'm not aware of, but the professor specified that the spring is there because it would be much harder to model this situation had there been a rigid connection between the masses.

Sorry for my display of daftness, but what would I be adding to obtain the two sets of coordinates? Also, I still don't have a practical idea of how to start this problem, and I still don't know what "[considering] the spring as compressable as well as expandable from it's "rest" state"...

We were told this is computationally much easier than having the two masses connected by a rigid "stick." Not entirely how or why, either. Also, if I'm only calculating the motion of the center of mass, does that not mean that I will not be obtaining the expected rotation of the two masses...

How do I account for spring force? And in terms of calculating and updating values, what should I be computing first?

Homework Statement Imagine that you toss the drumstick of a turkey to your friend across a table. Approximate the leg as a baton consisting of two equal masses connected by a stiff spring. Let the masses, m and M, each equal 0.1 kg (we’ll modify this assumption later) and connect them with a...

It is basically a point where all of the mass of a system could be considered to be located. Mathematically, the x-coordinate, for example, of a two-body system (containing mass M and mass m) would be (Mx1 + mx2)/(M+m), where x1 and x2 are the x-coordinates of of M and m, respectively. I'm...

Intuitively, I would say the star that is twice as massive would be closer to the CM, but I'm not quite sure if its displacement would be 1/2*r in magnitude.

So how would I find the initial velocities of the two stars?

I would think the COM is not moving at all.

Does center of mass play any role? How would I go about calculating the initial velocities?

I am tasked with modeling a binary star system using VPython. The language itself is relatively irrelevant, as I can deal with the syntax. My problem is with the logic of it and how I should go about structuring the necessary calculations. Homework Statement A binary star system consists of...