yes, very easily. A gravitational field can have an easily balanced elliptical orbit. It happens when the planets came into existence. You can play with these forces here..
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That sort of thing takes me back.
Years ago (early 90s) a lot of computer magazines contained a programming section. You had no internet, new software was hard to come by so people used to play with programming their own stuff, usually fun graphics and sounds. Gravity simulations were quite a common one*. They followed fairly basic rules. You have a gravitational mass in the centre acting like a big magnet or attractive force. That field follows an inverse square law, so the further away you are from it, the gravitational force is proportional to one divided by that distance squared (1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16 etc). You then fire a particle past it (but not directly at it), it has forward momentum and will try to remain on it's course, but gravity pulls at it and at each stage has an influence.
You could experiment, because the faster the particle or the further away, the less it was affected. If you fired something slow and close, then it would quickly spiral into it's doom. But get it just right and it would go into an orbit. In certain situations that could be an elliptical orbit.
Basically it was a graphical demo and was the result of combining two equations together. One a Newtonian equation of linear motion along with Keplers law of gravitation. It would take a few hours to write such programs, and then after half an hour of playing with the result you felt you had done most things with it. But combine a few of these things together, along with some smooth animation techniques and you start to build a physics engine for a game.
It was a way people could pass the time in the 90s, with a computer but no SMB, no YouTube and no Twitter.
The interesting thing is, that just these two rules could be used to create circular orbits, elliptical obits or something would fly into your 'system' do a parabolic curve around the central mass but have enough velocity to escape again, exactly like comets do. Just two basic rules and 50 lines of BASIC programming and you could have a crude representation of what we can actually observe.
* For those interested, other common ones were fractals and fractal landscapes, Game of Life cell simulation (
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), electron simulation (
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) etc. People just seeing what they could learn and make look pretty.