Royal Astronomical Society | 2017 Sep 14
[img3="Overturn motions in the oxygen burning shell of an 18 solar mass star, involving plumes of unburnt oxygen (green) and silicon ashes (red) around the silicon-iron core of the star (cyan). Part of the star is removed for better visibility. Credit: B. Mueller"]http://www.ras.org.uk/images/stories/pr ... otions.png[/img3][hr][/hr]An international team of astronomers have created the longest consistent 3D model of a neutrino-driven supernova explosion to date, helping scientists to better understand the violent deaths of massive stars. The research, conducted using supercomputers in Australia, Germany, and the DiRAC facility in the UK, is published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The largest explosions in the universe, so-called 'supernovae,' occur when stars many times larger than our own Sun reach the end of their lives and exhaust the nuclear fuel at their centres. At this point the innermost part of the star, an iron core itself about 1.5 times as massive as the Sun, succumbs to gravity and collapses to an ultra-dense neutron star within a fraction of a second.
In the process, the outer layers of the star are expelled in a gigantic supernova explosion, which ejects material at velocities of thousands of kilometres per second. Such supernovae are regularly observed in distant galaxies, and within the Milky Way we can still see the debris of many of them thousands of years later.
But a puzzle remains: how is the collapse of the star turned into an explosion? ...
Supernova Simulations from a 3D Progenitor Model -- Impact of Perturbations and Evolution of Explosion Properties - B. Müller et al
- Monthly Notices of the RAS 472(1):491 (Nov 2017) DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stx1962
arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1705.00620 > 01 May 2017 (v1), 28 Jul 2017 (v2)