Open-source cosmos

Stellarium/stellarium

Draws the real night sky live for your time and place: stars, planets and constellation lines. The web version needs no install.

achael/eht-imaging

Radio interferometry imaging software. When the Event Horizon Telescope published the first black hole image in 2019, this was one of the three imaging pipelines the collaboration used.

CelestiaProject/Celestia

A real-time 3D universe. Fly from Earth to other planets, stars and galaxies, with distances and orbits based on real data.

OpenSpace/OpenSpace

Astronomy visualization software developed by Linköping University in Sweden and the American Museum of Natural History. Its goal is to draw the whole known universe.

hannorein/rebound

An N-body simulator that computes how bodies in planetary systems, moons and rings pull on each other. The three-body problem has no general closed-form solution, so you have to step through it.

lightkurve/lightkurve

Processes light curves from the Kepler and TESS space telescopes. When a planet crosses in front of its star, the brightness dips slightly. You can find one yourself.

gwastro/pycbc

The core software package for finding signals in gravitational-wave detector data: it picks the "chirps" of merging black holes and neutron stars out of the noise.

cmbant/CAMB

Computes the temperature fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background. Cosmologists fit programs like this to Planck satellite data to work out the universe's age and composition.

Chakazul/Lenia

A continuous version of the Game of Life. A few math rules grow patterns that move, turn and split, like tiny creatures under a microscope. The online version is playable right away.

hunar4321/particle-life

Particles of a few colors move by one table of who attracts and who repels whom, and they clump into cell-like structures on their own. Without the interface, the code is under a page.

google-deepmind/alphafold

Predicts 3D protein structure from an amino acid sequence. Half of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to two of its developers, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper.

Revolutionary-Games/Thrive

An open-source game where you evolve from a single cell. Its development plan runs all the way to the space age.

MaxRobinsonTheGreat/LifeEngine

An evolution simulation in your browser. Small creatures are built from a few cell types, eat, move and reproduce, and every generation can mutate.

OneZoom/OZtree

Draws the whole tree of life as one map you can keep zooming into, from the root all the way down to a single species.

openworm/OpenWorm

A full computer simulation of the roundworm C. elegans: 302 neurons and 95 body wall muscles, from nerve signals to how the body wriggles.

devosoft/avida

Self-replicating computer programs mutate, compete and evolve inside it. A 2003 paper in Nature used it to watch how complex functions evolve step by step.

chrislgarry/Apollo-11

The guidance computer program for the 1969 Moon landing, transcribed from scans of printouts held by the MIT Museum. The file that handles ignition is called BURN_BABY_BURN.

github/archive-program

On 2 February 2020, GitHub wrote every active public repository of the time onto 186 reels of film and stored them in permafrost on Svalbard, Norway.

aourednik/historical-basemaps

Borders of countries and cultural regions across world history. The earliest map is 123,000 BCE, marked with Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis and Neanderthals.

nasa/fprime

A flight software framework from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The Mars helicopter Ingenuity runs on it.

owid/owid-grapher

The chart engine behind Our World in Data. Population, life expectancy, energy and carbon emissions: thousands of charts with a timeline you can drag.

orbitersim/orbiter

Fly spacecraft by Newtonian mechanics. There are no preset missions. You work out how to reach orbit, dock with a station and fly to another planet.

BOINC/boinc

Lets your home computer help scientists crunch numbers while idle. SETI@home used it to analyze radio telescope data in the search for alien signals, and stopped sending new tasks in 2020.

glottolog/glottolog

A catalog of the languages, language families and dialects of the world, each with its classification and bibliographic sources.