Widmanstätten Pattern: Meteorite Cooling Simulator

Deep inside a shattered asteroid's iron core, a molten iron-nickel alloy cools so slowly — a few degrees per million years — that its atoms have time to sort themselves into one of nature's most striking crystal structures: the Widmanstätten pattern. This simulator models the real Fe–Ni phase diagram physics behind it. Set the parent body's bulk nickel content and its core cooling rate, then play the cooling history forward and watch kamacite plates nucleate and grow along the four octahedral planes of the taenite parent crystal, exactly as they did over millions of years inside a real meteorite before it ever reached Earth.