Spatial Distributions Paper Accepted

Date September 18, 2009

Doughnut MethodOur paper on type Ia supernova spatial distributions and how they can be used to age date SNe Ia has been accepted for publication in ApJ. You can read a draft of it here.

Prompt Ia Supernovae are Significantly Delayed

This is the paper wherein we develop a new observational technique that builds on previous work by Andy Fruchter and others.

The Gort Principle

Date September 18, 2009

fltmass_sph.5150.vszgort

A simulation of the collision of a 0.8 solar mass white dwarf (bottom) and a 0.6 solar mass white dwarf (top).

Another Crack at Visualizations

Date August 28, 2009

grazing_sph.4000.cubeBob Greene of LANL has turned his viz talents on our SPH simulation outputs. Here is a sample of what his tools can do.

Pictured here is a single frame from a collision scenario. The two spheres embedded in the larger cloud are simply the cores of the constituent white dwarfs that have yet to merge. We hope to eventually make animations using this technique.

Collisions Paper Accepted

Date August 27, 2009

Our paper on white dwarf collisions, On Type Ia Supernovae From The Collisions of Two White Dwarfs, has been accepted by MNRAS. It should be published within a month or so.

Wolfram|Alpha

Date July 2, 2009

walphaI use this almost every day now and I recommend anyone who relies heavily on a TI-89 or just occasionally wants to compute something check it out.

Working at LANL this Summer

Date July 2, 2009

lanl_logoI started at LANL this week and will be working here for the remainder of July on reintegrating the changes made to our version of SNSPH into the main code branch.

A Few More Visualizations

Date May 26, 2009

The text on the color bars didn’t survive the jpeging process too well.

Doughnut Method & the LSST

Date May 18, 2009

Doughnut MethodEvan is a member of the LSST team, and so now our “doughnut method” for constraining type Ia SNe will be a small part of the science goals of the LSST.

To read more about the “doughnut method“, check out our paper on it, Prompt Ia Supernovae are Significantly Delayed which has been submitted to ApJ Letters.

Collision Poster

Date May 18, 2009

White Dwarf Collision Poster A poster of one of our white dwarf collision simulations will be on display outside of the SESE office very soon. It will probably also be on display somewhere on the Astronomy floor of the F-wing. Here is the final mockup from Susan Selkirk.

Depicted here, two CO 0.6Msun white dwarfs collide with an impact parameter of 1/2 the white dwarf radius. They detonate as a supernova and end up looking something like Tycho’s SNR shown in the background of the poster. This simulation consisted of approximately 800,000 particles and used a 13 isotope reaction network.

SPH Visualizations are a GO!

Date May 15, 2009

Binary DensityBinary Temperature

I recently wrote a visualization routine for SNSPH that incorporates the smoothing kernel and interpolates on a grid. I think the results are pretty impressive. Click each image to get a larger version.

The actual plotting of the routine’s output is done in Veusz.