Is it possible to create a binary planet?

[Vorthon]

I've been wondering if it's possible to create a binary planet system, with a center of gravity between two planet sized objects. it would bee great if someone let me know if this is possible.

[selden]

The "correct" way to specify a binary planet is to first define the center that they orbit around -- formally, that's called a "barycenter". In SSC (Solar Ssytem Catalog) files, the barycenter orbits around their sun, and the planets orbit around their barycenter. A planetary barycenter can be defined as an SSC object with Class "invisible" or as a ReferencePoint. Then you define the orbits of the planets with respect to that object.

An example of this is included in Celestia. Pluto and Charon are essentially a binary planet. Their orbits are defined at the very end of Celestia/data/solarsys.ssc, which is a plain-text file. You can use your favorite editor (e.g. Notepad) to look at it.

Celestia is just a display program. It doesn't know anything about gravity or stable orbits. It will let you place your planets any way you want. People usually expect Addon SSC files to specify orbits that are realistic, though. You'll have to do some arithmetic to specify the orbital parameters which are correct for the masses and distances of the planets that you define.

Does this help?

[Vorthon]

This is exactly the help I needed! thanks for the help.