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lhd1 2 hours ago

One of the cool facts about gravity is that the gravitational field of a body 'feels' spherical at a distance, even if those bodies are not spherical themselves. There are higher multipoles but they are increasingly suppressed the further you are from the body. So at least for gravity the spherical approximation turns out to be good and justified.

DroneBetter 2 hours ago | parent [-]

for simulating gravity in particular you can do one better, since a sphere is in turn gravitationally indistinguishable from a point mass due to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_theorem#Force_on_a_point...

naklitechie 19 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

This deserves a simulator

lhd1 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

and you can do one better than that - Birkhoff's theorem, the relativistic analogue of the shell theorem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birkhoff%27s_theorem_(relativi...