Stony Brook University
Harriman Hall, Room 137
7:30 pm, Friday, September 01, 2023
All about stellar combustion or: How I learned to stop worrying and love thermonuclear supernovae.
Prof. Alan Caldar
Thermonuclear (aka type Ia) supernovae are bright stellar explosions that occur when a massive white dwarf star undergoes a thermonuclear runaway. The explosion outcome is extremely sensitive to the nature of the burning and successfully modeling these events requires an understanding of turbulent combustion.
In the next of the popular Astronomy Open Night series, Prof. Alan Calder will discuss the fundamentals of combustion in the context of thermonuclear supernovae. He will describe flames and the effect of fluid instabilities and turbulence, and present models of thermonuclear supernovae that incorporate these.
Prof. Calder joined the Stony Brook Physics and Astronomy department in 2007 after research appointments at the University of Illinois and the University of Chicago. His research is in numerically modeling astrophysical phenomena, and he has studied core collapse and thermonuclear supernovae, coalescing neutron stars, and classical novae.
