IACS Student Seminar 2023

The IACS student seminar is held to give opportunities for IACS students to talk about their research, and practice explaining it to an audience with a wide background. My talk was on the challenges with modeling the Convective Urca process in simmering white dwarfs using the low mach code MAESTROeX.

Abstract

The Computational Challenges in Simulating a Star Prior to its Thermonuclear Explosion.

Many areas of astrophysics are impossible to directly observe and include complex interactions that are very challenging to analyze theoretically. In these cases, computational simulations are a vital piece to test models of astrophysical phenomena. One such area is the study of type Ia supernovae. These are incredibly bright thermonuclear explosions of a star that can be seen far across the universe and are vital to many areas of astronomy. Despite this, there are many aspects of these events which are not well understood. In particular, we investigate the time immediately preceding the explosion, called the simmering phase. During the simmering phase, there is a poorly understood relation between fluid dynamics and nuclear reactions called the convective Urca problem. We use detailed 3D hydrodynamic simulations to study the Urca problem. However, working with these simulations has its own list of challenges to overcome (e.g. sensitivity to initial conditions and extensive need of computational resources). We present the results of our simulations and how they play a role in understanding the convective Urca problem and the thermonuclear explosion of stars.

This research was supported in part by the US Department of Energy (DOE) under grant DE-FG02-87ER40317

The slides can be downloaded here.