Challenges of Modeling Stellar Explosions
Michael Zingale, Stony Brook University
https://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/ia...
Abstract:
Stars spend their lives generating energy via thermonuclear fusion. Their overall evolution is driven by the changing composition in their interiors, and at the late stages of evolution and during explosive events, the nuclear timescale can be short and drive strong hydrodynamic flows. Modeling these environments is challenging. Our group has been developing simulation codes that can accurately model stellar reactive flows, through novel time-integration methods that strongly couple reactions and hydrodynamics. Furthermore, our codes are designed to run on modern GPU-based supercomputers. In this talk I'll describe some of the algorithmic work we have done for stellar reacting flows and show some applications to different types of supernovae. This work is done in our open source AMReX-Astrophysics simulation suite (https://github.com/amrex-astro/).
Bio:
Michael Zingale is a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Stony Brook University. He earned a BS in Physics and Astronomy (1996) from the University of Rochester and a PhD in Astronomy and Astrophysics (2000) from the University of Chicago. He was part of the Flash Code development team that won a Gordon Bell Prize in 2000, and received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) through DOE NNSA in 2005, and an Outstanding Junior Investigator award for the DOE Office of Nuclear Physics in 2006. Michael's research involves the development of new algorithms for efficiently modeling convection in stellar interiors. He is a codeveloper of the Open Source astrophysical, multiscale/multiphysics simulation codes Castro and MAESTROeX and the nuclear astrophysics library pynucastro. He applies these codes to studies of early phases of Type Ia supernovae, novae, and X-ray bursts.