When Stars Go Bang…

I learned* that over on the Huffington Post, Christian Ott (Caltech) wrote a piece describing research on modelling stellar explosions using supercomputers. When a star goes supernova, what exactly happens? Capturing the physics that goes on is a very difficult problem to do, and in the article he explains some of the difficulties, and some of the recent progress.

There’s a slide show showing some of the results of simulations that have been done of the fully three-dimensional problem, and a little movie that puts it all together.

Enjoy!

-cvj

*Thanks Crystal D.!