| Candace Church Address: 187 Nat Sci, UC Santa Cruz, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA 95064 Tel: 831.459-1637 Email: cchurch@ucolick.org |
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ResearchThe above image is a snapshot of the oxygen distribution inside a 15 solar mass, zero metal star ~ 5 hours after its explosion as a supernova. This three dimensional simulation was performed using CASTRO on Franklin at NERSC. I'm currently in the process of running simulations of rotating zero metallicity, solar metallicity, and very low metallicity models (with Z= 10^-4 Z_sun) in three dimensions with CASTRO. These simulations are spherically symmetric, because they are initialized from Kepler models that have been artificially exploded by means of a piston. Despite the obvious problems with this (Supernovae probably don't explode spherically! And the explosion is probably better approximated by energy deposition than a piston!) this sort of simulation will shed light on the differenced between modeling the Rayleigh-Taylor instability in three vs. two dimensions, and whether or not the pre-supernova structure of the star influences just how different the three and two dimensional models are. |
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