An Overview of Current Research in Computer Modeling of Stellar Explosions

Mike Guidry, University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Some stars, like our Sun, will end their lives in relatively orderly fashion, expanding into red giants, losing their outer envelopes as planetary nebulae, and fading away as inert, slowly-cooling white dwarfs. This presentation is not about those stars. It is about a small subset of stars that die an extremely violent death, leading to some of the largest explosions observed in the Universe. These events include core-collapse supernovae, Type Ia supernovae, pair instability supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, and neutron star mergers (with evidence that some of these categories overlap). Such explosions can release sufficient energy to outshine entires galaxies of normal stars for a period of time, and can lead to some of the most exotic phenomena studied in astrophysics: enormous bursts of neutrinos, strong gravitational waves, and rapidly-rotating neutron stars or black holes coupled to huge magnetic fields. This presentation will review at a non-specialist level current attempts to model such explosions, their observational signatures such as neutrino emission and gravitational wave emission, and the role of these violent events in shaping the elemental composition of our Universe.

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