Astronomers Explode Virtual Supernova

DynaSoar writes "Scientists at the University of Chicago's Center for Astrophysical Thermonuclear Flashes have created a simulation of a white dwarf exploding into a type 1a supernova. Using 700 processors and 58,000 hours, they produced a three second movie showing the initial burst that is thought to be the source of much of the iron in the universe. Understanding these supernovas is also important to testing current cosmological theories regarding dark matter and dark energy, as their brightness is used as a measurement of distance, and discrepancies found in the brightness of very distant supernovas consistently seem to indicate a change in the speed of expansion of the universe over time."

Comments

Re:58000 hours

[QuantumG]

Somehow I doubt it is a feat of supercomputing marvel if it only takes 86 hours. More likely 6 years, or the submitter just completely made up those numbers, as they're not in the story anywhere.

A better article on the supernova simulation

[Ace905]

There's a much better, and more recent article on this simulation hosted at www.nasa.gov - but the site is unbelievably slow to load as of late. You can see the nasa.gov article mirrored at http://douginadress.com/news/spaceexploration/berk eley_labs_supernova_data_crunching.html