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Navigate the fiery aftermath of a supernova in the “Journey through an Exploded Star” interactive simulation. Adventure through the full spectrum of radiant energy as it blossoms out in 360° in this never-before-seen 3D view of a supernova remnant. Built with real scientific data, this interactive allows the user to visualize the ...
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After spending three months trying to blow up a star, Hans-Thomas Janka and his team finally saw what they had been waiting for. Like the world’s most patient pyromaniacs, they watched their massive stellar simulation — rendered in painstaking detail — inch closer to detonation. Each day, their supercomputer ticked through just 5 milliseconds of the star’s life.
But perseverance has its rewards. In the team’s previous attempts to make a realistic simulation, the stellar fireworks always petered out. This time, in 2015, Janka watched as the shock wave needed to drive the explosion continued to grow; the mock star was going supernova1. “That was the moment we recognized that, OK, now we are at the point we longed to be at for two decades,” says Janka, a theoretical astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany. “We were on the path to clarifying the explosion mechanism of these massive stars.”
For more than half a century, physicists have suspected that the heat produced by elusive particles called neutrinos, created in the core of a star, could generate a blast that radiates more energy in a single second than the Sun will in its lifetime. But they have had trouble proving that hypothesis. The detonation process is so complex — incorporating general relativity, fluid dynamics, nuclear and other physics — that computers have struggled to mimic the mechanism in silico. And that poses a problem. “If you can’t reproduce it,” Janka says, “that means you don’t understand it.”
Now, improvements in raw computing power, along with efforts to capture the stellar physics in acute detail, have enabled substantial progress. Janka’s simulation marked the first time that physicists had been able to get a realistic 3D model of the most common type of supernova to explode. Just months later, a competing group based at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee repeated the feat with a heavier, more complex star2. The field is now buzzing, with more than half a dozen teams currently working on exploding stars in 3D. Many researchers are confident that they are closing in on identifying the ingredients that are crucial to generating such blasts.
“Not obtaining explosions, of course, was a big disappointment, and created some desperation” Your browser does not support the audio element.
•Brightest-ever supernova still baffles astronomers
•The guts of a dying star
- Elizabeth Gibney
- 2018
Jun 6, 2016 · Astronomers are attempting to simulate what happens during violent supernovas in a bid to learn more about how stars die. Using software called Mira, the researchers are performing large-scale 3D ...
May 11, 2020 · It also turns out that some things explode more easily in 3D and 3D simulations offer a clearer window on how that occurs. The picture that’s emerging suggests that the turbulent pressure of the exploding star matter is the central factor in the explosion.
Jun 5, 2023 · With the current 3D simulation, the model supernovae are now behaving the way that supernovae behave in nature. The model is closer than ever to describing and predicting what happens in these explosions. Scientists are also working to expand the length of their simulations. They’re aiming to cover the four to five seconds before the event.
Feb 18, 2014 · Transcript. NuSTAR is untangling the mystery of how stars explode. Here we're looking at a simulation of a supernova explosion of a massive star that's collapsing in on itself. Shown in color is the temperature of the gas as the star is exploding. What happens is that hot bubbles at the center of the core blast out through the shockwave ...
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Apr 30, 2019 · The Smithsonian has made available a new online interactive that allows users to explore a three-dimensional (3-D) visualization of the remnants of a supernova, or exploded star. Designed for use by both general audiences and high school science classrooms, the free materials are available at s.si.edu/supernova and include an interactive simulation, 360-degree video and multimedia ...
