Kuiper Belt Collisional Cascade

Beyond Neptune, trillions of icy leftovers from planet formation slowly grind each other to dust. This simulator tracks a Kuiper Belt-like population across 22 logarithmic size bins and evolves it with the real physics of collisional cascades: an impactor breaks its target apart once the impact energy per unit mass exceeds the size-dependent disruption threshold Q*_D, and the debris is redistributed into smaller bodies following the Dohnanyi self-similar fragment spectrum. Watch an initially shallow size distribution steepen toward the classic equilibrium slope, tune impact velocity and material strength to see how the disruption threshold shifts, and accelerate time to compress gigayears of grinding into a few seconds while live readouts track the emergent power-law slope and the mass lost to dust along the way.