Home▸Space & Astronomy▸Protoplanetary Disks: From Dust Grains to Planets

🪐 Protoplanetary Disks: From Dust Grains to Planets

An interactive 3D disk of gas and dust orbiting a young star — speed up simulated time to watch dust grains collide, stick, and grow into planetesimals and protoplanets.

Space & Astronomy3DModerate60 FPS

A rotating disk of gas and dust orbits a young star; speed up simulated time to watch micron-sized grains collide, stick, and grow through planetesimals into glowing protoplanets.

🔬 What It Demonstrates

Each grain follows a real Keplerian orbit — faster close to the star, slower farther out. Nearby grains merge probabilistically, conserving mass and volume, and are reclassified from dust to planetesimal to protoplanet as they grow past size thresholds.

🎮 How to Use

Raise time speed to fast-forward accretion, tune stickiness to see how collision efficiency changes growth rate, and toggle the gas disk and snow line to compare rocky grains inside it against icy grains beyond it.

💡 Did You Know?

Beyond the snow line, water and other volatiles freeze onto grains, roughly doubling the solid material available — one reason gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn formed farther from the Sun than the rocky inner planets.

⚙ Under the hood

Interactive 3D disk of gas and dust around a young star where speeding up simulated time shows dust grains colliding and sticking, growing into planetesimals and eventually protoplanets.

protoplanetary-disksplanet-formationstar-formationplanetesimalsastronomy

3D · Three.js / WebGL renderer · 60 FPS target · runs fully client-side, no install