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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."
http://flash.uchicago.edu/website/research/gallery /home.py
for all alternative OS users out there.
7000 processors and 58000 hours? SG-1 Did that in a single episode! On a TV special effects budget no less!
So, they started the simulation over six years ago?
Repton.
They say that only an experienced wizard can do the tengu shuffle.
Does anyone else see the "face" that is created during this explosion? I see closed eyes, a nose and even a mouth(all tongue in cheek) ROFLMAO... sorry poor joke..... would love to see this at full speed.
> created a simulation of a white dwarf exploding into a type 1a supernova. Using 700 processors and 58,000 hours,
They probably got Federal Funding for this by explaining it was "like sticking a giant firecracker up a giant frog"
You insensative clods! They killed my virtual friends and my virtual dog orbiting around that star on a virtual planet! Just because they are bits instead of molecules is no reason to demean them.
Table-ized A.I.
supernovas
Shouldn't that be supernovae?
Have you read my journal today?
I'm sorry, I had to check when their acronym spells CATFUC.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Bob: But we'll never get funding with a three second image. This thing had to have caused something useful .. ... how about something specific like Kevin Federline?
Joe: Well, um
Bob: No, panders too much to popular culture.
Joe: That's too bad because my next thought was heavy metal music. Oh, how about some type of boring "metal" like iron ore. It's in some vitamins too which will interest the average consumer.
Bob: That'll do. We have to get the funding proposal out by noon.
Gah that article is awful. They link to pretty pictures and blurbs mostly and never really explain what these things are, why they are important or give you any real sense of scale. So since I like to beat on the drum of better communication of science, here is a little more detail to add to the good einhverfr's post.
The progenitors of SNIa are most likely white dwarfs composed of carbon nitrogen and oxygen, probably with a companion star from which they are stripping matter. They are very compact on the order of a few thousand kilometers at most, and really dense - more than the mass of the sun. They aren't hot enough to support fusion - they are supported by Pauli pressure; quantum mechanics doesn't allow two electrons in the same state at the same time so though gravity tries to compact these objects there is a Pauli pressure outward to balance it.
This can't go on forever in these progenitor systems however, and if the white dwarf strips enough matter of its companion to get to ~1.4 solar masses (the Chandrashekar limit) then Pauli pressure isn't strong enough to balance gravity and the star begins to collapse and when that happens pressure and temperature rises and somewhere a nuclear fusion flame ignites. Details about what happens near collapse, and where and how the flame ignites, and how many there are and how they progress are still debated. In this particular model they are considering only a single flame (so far) and its a "gravitationally confined detonation" (GCD - the name of this particular model).
Its a little difficult to get a sense of scale from those videos, though there are numbers in the bottom corner. The flame starts of near or just of center and becomes bubble/mushroom shaped through a Rayleigh-Taylor instability and breaks the stellar surface in under a second. Its less than another second before the ash and flame from the bubble collides at the opposite end of the star. This flame crashing into itself (see video 1) causes compression and a detonation.
Theres been a lot of debate as to whether its a deflagration or a detonation or whether it transitions from one to the other and how and when that happens and us poor graduate students just hope they don't go crazy over details of the progenitors during our qualifying examinations. This is notable because there appears to be a growing number of voices who are saying that a detonation is necessary. These events are so standard because they all become SNIa if they get near 1.4 solar masses. There is a fair bit of diversity (and some just crazy objects) and most of that probably arises from details during the explosion which is why modeling them is partly why the models are so important.
There is still a lot of modeling left to do. This flame is producing a lot of heavy elements (there is O, S, Ca, Mg and Si in the early spectra - the silicon feature is around 6150 angstrom in the rest frame and is the marker of a Ia at low to moderate redshifts). As the outer layers expand and become more transparent you see more of the material produced during the explosion and a lot of this is Nickel (Ni-56) which decays to cobalt and powers the light curve so you get this typically 2 week rise and then a slow fall off. Later times most of the Ni has become cobalt which is decaying to iron and you see these elements in the spectrum. The energies we are talking about here are about 10^45 Joules. A H bomb by contrast is 10^15 Joules so 30 order of magnitude. Unless you can picture 10^30 H bombs going off its hard to get a feeling for this number but thats generally the case with numbers in cosmology.
There are a lot of empirical relations you see from the lightcurve, which are exploited to standardize them (for instance the brighter the supernova, the slower its rate of decline, and there are relations for the colour...) and if a model can replicate them and match the observed lightcurves and spectra then this is a very impressive accomplishment. I skim
Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
The priorities are NOT wrong!
Knowledge for knowledge's sake ALWAYS ends up paying off.
Just because we dont know how to make our lives better by virtue of gaining this knowledge now, there's no reason to suppose we'll never know (in fact, history indicates that eventually ALL research pays off to some extent).
If you RTFA and do a slight bit of reasoning (I know, I know, but try), you will see that this research directly helps us understand more of the hydrogen -> helium mechanincs.
Repeat after me:
ALL KNOWLEDGE IS VALUABLE.
KNOWING IS ALWAYS BETTER THAN NOT KNOWING.
Ignorance being bliss was a concept invented to placate the ignorant.
Since you're browsing slashdot when instead you could be working on harnessing fusion power, it would seem that you're just as guilty of having skewed priorities as these astrophysicists.
In fact, the word is built out of two Latin adjectives, literally it means an "abovenew". Invented words follow this rule, hence the plural of octopus is octopuses, of satellite is satellites, and of millennium is millenniums. The plural of "vertebra" is "vertebrae" because it is an actual Latin word, not an invented modern one.
Incidentally, while pursuing this very pedantic note, "satellites" is correct plural but the singular of the original word is "satelles". And the original word is pronounced sat-ell-it-ees. We are a long way from Latin.
Pining for the fjords
You got some answers which are good enough, but I'd like to add a point.
Further development in materials and energy sources today relies upon gaining a better understanding of the physics involved. After all, it's hard to do engineering when you don't know the rules. While we have very good models for large-scale physics, we're still lacking at the subatomic level.
The difficulty of subatomic physics is that the particles are so small that their influences are difficult to detect. One way to solve that is to accelerate them to very large energies, high enough that we could notice a single quark out of place. That's the principle of a particle accelerator.
The problem is that we can only get so much energy, and on a small scale, with our puny devices here on Earth. Out there in space, some processes have way more energy than we could ever harness, so we can learn important things about physics just by watching. The reason to simulate a supernova is so that we know what we should expect given our current models. Likely, observation of actual supernovas is going to show discrepancies with the simulation, and those discrepancies will be grounds for further research to improve our models.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
Both could be correct if you use them properly in the sentence. Supernovae when it's the subject, supernovas when it's the object. Assuming we're treating "supernova" as a regular 1st-declension latin feminine noun.
Strictly speaking, super (as a preposition of space or location, in this case) takes nova in the ablative case, so the ending on nova is a long a (ahhhhh). If we were writing in Latin I don't know that we'd use the -ae ending for the plural at all. In fact, I'm not sure what the plural would be. I assume we'd throw a pronoun before "super nova", maybe "eae super nova" (they who are above the new [thing]), and continue on with the sentence with "eae" (feminine they) as our subject. Or we could use Illae (those) as our subject, which might be less proper and more vulgar-latin slangy.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb