The most detailed computer simulation yet of the turbulent motion inside an exploding star has been carried out by the world's foremost supercomputer.
The results help explain how nuclear reactions in a star's core suddenly speed up to produce some of the most powerful explosions in the universe ? Type Ia supernovae.
The simulation was carried out by William Cabot and Andrew Cook, both at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, US. They ran it on the world's fastest supercomputer, IBM's BlueGene/L, which is located at the same laboratory. This computer can perform a staggering 281 trillion mathematical operations each second.
The brightness of Type Ia supernovae is predictable, allowing astronomers to gauge distances to other galaxies by measuring their glow. Such measurements have been crucial to the discovery of dark energy, thought to be accelerating the expansion of the universe.
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