Researchers studying the formation and external diffusion of elements in the early days of the universe have created a 300-day simulation of a hypernova using one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.
A team led by Ke-Jung Chen of the Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Academia Sinica in Taiwan focused their efforts on hypernovae, 100 times more powerful than standard supernovae, which only occur when stars explode between 120 and 250 times mass. of our sun.
“The larger the simulation scale, to keep the resolution high, the whole calculation will become very difficult and will require much more computational power, not to mention that the physics involved is also complicated.” Chen said.
Supernovae happen all the time, but hypernovae are rarely seen in the ‘modern era’ of the universe. Scientists suspect that these may have been the forges that created many of the heaviest elements seen in the entire universe, and thus could help unlock the origins of life and the universe itself.
There are two main types of supernova explosions: core collapse (when a star runs out of fuel) or pair instability (when electrons and positrons create chaos within a massive star).
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The researchers focused on this type of pair instability, as it produces large amounts of nickel-56, the radioactive isotope of nickel, the decomposition of which creates the glow of a supernova that we can observe long after the initial bright flash of the explosion.
The team used the Cray XC50 supercomputer at the Computational Astrophysics Center (CfCA) of the Japan National Astronomical Observatory (NAOJ), formerly one of the fastest devices in the world.
This simulation ran for 300 days, compared to the previous 30-day record, so the large compute volume and required computational power is staggering. But with some adjustments and skillful math skill, the team managed it.
Gas motion and radiation within an ongoing supernova are extremely difficult to code. Despite this difficulty, the researchers observed a hot nickel-56 bubble that formed a shell approximately 200 days after the initial explosion.
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This indicates that approximately 30 percent of the energy from the explosion is expended on gas movement, leaving the remaining 70 percent available for the luminosity of the supernova, making these hypernovae “the last cosmic lighthouses” Perfect for studying the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope and its contemporary next-generation probes.
A better investigation of these hypernovae and their underlying processes will help to extend the outer limits of scientific understanding and to expand our knowledge of our ancient heavenly history.
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