Modeling Supernovae With a Supercomputer

A team of scientists at the University of Chicago will be using 22 million processor-hours to simulate the physics of exploding stars. The team will make use of the Blue Gene/P supercomputer at Argonne National Laboratory to analyze four different scenarios for type Ia supernovae. Included in the link is a video simulation of a thermonuclear flame busting its way out of a white dwarf. The processing time was made possible by the Department of Energy's INCITE program. "Burning in a white dwarf can occur as a deflagration or as a detonation. 'Imagine a pool of gasoline and throw a match on it. That kind of burning across the pool of gasoline is a deflagration,' Jordan said. 'A detonation is simply if you were to light a stick of dynamite and allow it to explode.' In the Flash Center scenario, deflagration starts off-center of the star's core. The burning creates a hot bubble of less dense ash that pops out the side due to buoyancy, like a piece of Styrofoam submerged in water."

Comments

Re:flawed

[DeadChobi]

You guys are missing the point of the modeling. You don't always model something to make predictions of its actual behavior. In this case modeling serves as an excellent way to test our models against empirical data collected from observations of supernovae. So, we do our best to construct a model, then compare this model to the real system in order to expose holes in our understanding of the phenomenon. This is good science.

!news

[ScreamingCactus]

I thought this story sounded familiar. Then I clicked the link, and lo and behold, there's the exact same video I remembered watching a year ago. I double checked -- the video was dated March of 2007. So why is this just now making headlines? I could understand if they re-ran the simulation with new physics that proved to be more accurate or something, but why link to the old video?

Re:flawed

[madboson]

we understand little about it and the math formula used will be a half guess. supercomputer or not, results will be speculative at best. There is a big difference between guessing at some thing and hoping for the best, verses a systematic analysis of a problem using all the available knowledge that man has right now. Yeah, sounds like a sugar coating on exactly the same thing but come on and think about it. Science is mix a little ingenuity in with previously known facts and a healthy dose of self cynicism. It's the self defeatist attitude like this that hampers progress.

Not to mention several "PhD life spans" probably were spent on even programming this model and testing it in every way possible. No this is not speculative at best, this is a huge opportunity to actually test what we know against reality which is the point of this kind of theoretical science! Now if you please some of us have science to get back to, your welcome to continue to yell foul from as far away as possible.