The Kepler-1647 stars are reasonably peaceful. They would also each rotate with a 10-day period, which would make them a little more active than our current sun, but not outrageously so. Our Sun 1 and Sun 2 would orbit each other once every 10 days or so. That’s not so different than the two stars of Kepler-1647, which are about 7 million miles apart. Just to be safe, let’s put the stars closer together, about 5 million kilometers apart. If Sun 1 and Sun 2 are less than 15 million kilometers apart, then all of the planets in the solar system (even Mercury) could potentially be stable. As long as the distance to the planet is at least about 4 times as great as the separation between the two stars, the planet just happily orbits around the stars’ center of mass. But would the Earth be stable in its new configuration, orbiting around two stars instead of one? The case of Kepler-1647b and other circumbinary stars gives a strong “yes” answer here. Since their total gravity would be stronger, the length of a year would be a bit less: about 280 days instead of 365 days. The combined mass of Sun 1 and Sun 2 would be 1.7 times the mass of our current sun. A 15% mass reduction is enough to cut a star’s brightness in half. Roughly speaking, luminosity goes as the 4th power of mass, so doubling the mass of a star increases its brightness by a factor of 16 (2x2x2x2). That may seem surprising, but the luminosity of a star is extremely sensitive to mass. RPS will be there, with developer session, games and more.The mass of each of our new suns (I’ll call them Sun 1 and Sun 2) would be about 85% of the mass of our current sun. If you don't own an HTC Vive yourself, you might be interested to know you can come along and try it at this year's EGX Rezzed. To access the VR beta now, right-click on the game in Steam and go to Properties, then the Beta tab, then scroll down in the dropdown till you see 'vr-experimental'.
Much has changed since then of course, but there's still more work to be done on the game and VR mode, with another beta update to the latter coming this Thursday. Call me a thicko dipshit who wallows in the slurry of his own stupidity, but even in its current form, Universe Sandbox 2 has done as much to lift me from my colossal ignorance as any game I’ve recently played. There are a few minor bugs (I once had Mercury headbutt the Sun out of existence) and not all the features are seemingly yet implemented (what does the habitable zone toggle do?), but the devs anticipate another whole year in Early Access, during which time more bespoke community-suggested simulations, like the New Horizons fly-by, will be added, as well as life simulation, terraforming, missions, space tethers and more. Here's what Marsh said about US2 when he prematurely evaluated it in August of last year: Good news for people who want to spawn 40 moons around and watch them crash into the earth. Here's a video of user Brad Lynch playing with the mode with the HTC Vive: The game, which is currently in early access, now has a beta VR mode you can access through Steam. Or to see how it would work if you spawned an enormous sun next to them and watched them all be gobbled up. The tool let's you open solar systems, galaxies, and other celestial bodies and then tinker with them in order to see how they work. That's useful when it comes to educational glimpses at outerspace, which is also what Universe Sandbox 2 is good for. If there's one thing virtual reality conveys well, it's scale.