Ever wanted to control the stars with your outstretched arm? An open-source virtual reality platform just made it possible.

What in 1991 was a novel physics solution now comes packaged in a virtual world for you to intuitively explore. A new simulation in OpenSim, an open-source version of the popular virtual world Second Life, shows how a handful of objects floating in space react to each others’ gravity.

In physics, this is known as the N-body problem. It’s simple if you have only two objects: they orbit their common center of mass in a circle or an ellipse. But three or more objects send the system into chaos. Physicists and mathematicians banged their head against it for centuries, with a general solution emerging less than 20 years ago.

“It is exceedingly deep,” said Will Farr, a grad student at MIT and collaborator on the project. “PhD physics researchers work on it every single day, but if you