Multidimensional Simulations of Convection Preceding Type I X-ray Bursts

Statistics – Computation

Scientific paper

Rate now

  [ 0.00 ] – not rated yet Voters 0   Comments 0

Details

Scientific paper

Type I X-ray bursts are interesting thermonuclear phenomena that can be used to determine the mass and radius of the underlying neutron star and hence help constrain the equation of state for dense matter. Particularly important is our physical understanding of how a localized, subsonic burning front ignites and spreads, the state of the material in which the burning front propagates, and the extent to which heat released from reactions expands the photosphere of the neutron star. Multidimensional simulation of low Mach number astrophysical flows, such as the propagation of a flame or the slow convective turnover, in such systems have been rather restricted in the past; fully compressible hydrodynamics algorithms have a timestep size that is constrained by the propagation of acoustic waves, which can be neglected in low Mach number flows of this type. Here we present results of multidimensional, plane-parallel simulations of the convection preceding ignition in a Type I X-ray burst. We use a low Mach number code, MAESTRO, based on a low Mach number approximation, which filters acoustic waves from the system allowing for a larger timestep size while retaining the important compressible features, such as expansion from local heating and composition change. This allows us to perform long-term evolution of the system and characterize the effects of convection on the atmosphere. In particular, we find that the convection dredges up some of the underlying 56Fe neutron star material into the atmosphere, which may affect any subsequent subsonic burning front.
This work is supported under the DOE/Office of Nuclear Physics, grant No. DE-FG02-06ER41448 (Stony Brook) and by the SciDAC Program of the DOE Office of Mathematics, Information, and computational Sciences
under the DOE under contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231.

No associations

LandOfFree

Say what you really think

Search LandOfFree.com for scientists and scientific papers. Rate them and share your experience with other people.

Rating

Multidimensional Simulations of Convection Preceding Type I X-ray Bursts does not yet have a rating. At this time, there are no reviews or comments for this scientific paper.

If you have personal experience with Multidimensional Simulations of Convection Preceding Type I X-ray Bursts, we encourage you to share that experience with our LandOfFree.com community. Your opinion is very important and Multidimensional Simulations of Convection Preceding Type I X-ray Bursts will most certainly appreciate the feedback.

Rate now

     

Profile ID: LFWR-SCP-O-1398322

  Search
All data on this website is collected from public sources. Our data reflects the most accurate information available at the time of publication.