Secret Ingredient Found to Power Supernovas (Turbulence) | Hacker News Reader

Secret Ingredient Found to Power Supernovas (Turbulence)

quantamagazine.org

The secret ingredient is turbulence (which shows up in 3 dimensional flow models but not the simple 1D models that were used in the past). Maybe this can be added to the title to make it less clickbaity?

OK, I updated it.

'“While we’re waiting for the next supernova [in our galaxy], we have a lot of work to do. We need to improve the theoretical modeling to understand what features we could detect,” said Irene Tamborra'

I'm mildly amused by someone with the surname "Tamborra" who's anticipating a stupendous explosion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Tambora

Cow hypothesizers find updated modelling to include legs yields richer behavior and answers previously unexplained results.

Cows are spherical.

That reminds me of an old joke about a Physics professor at the horse races. He modeled the horses as perfect spheres starting at rest, and the racetrack as a perfectly smooth infinite plane. To a first order approximation, none of the horses are able to finish the race.

The research described in the article is in fact about how spherical cows have peristalsis[0] which explain some facets of their behavior.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peristalsis

As far as I can determine, this[1] is an older video from the paper[2] linked in the article, showing the first hundred milliseconds.

Also found this[3] presentation by Adam Burrows, also mentioned in the article, giving an overview on the 3D simulations compared to the older 1D and 2D simulations.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxGajNoPz8c

[2]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1503.02199

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDk5AzmNCCk

Pretty incredible that the simulations take "many months" to run on what I presume would be a supercomputer of some sort. What sort of resolution are they modelling these events at?

Picking one of the linked papers at random they are simulating down to about 500m cubes.

To put that in some sort of perspective, NOAA's highest resolution weather model uses 3000m grids and they are "only" simulating the thin layer of atmosphere over a single continent.

But the NOAA's weather grids are probably populated with a greater number of variables. And they have a vertical dimension/gradient that isn't present in the homogenous blocks of material simulated in the stars.

I only mean to point out that 500m is quite detailed, particularly in terms of the vast scale of a star. I wasn't commenting on the relative sophistication of the models or anything like that.

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