ASC Center for Astrophysical Thermonuclear Flashes

Breaking News Flash

FLASH tutorial is announced for June 22-23, 2009. [ More ]

FLASH3.0 was released on February 29th, 2008! [ More ]

The 1000th request for the FLASH code was received at 4:17 a.m. CDT on Wednesday, 27 June 2007.

FLASH Center scientists simulate a successful, fully-3D type Ia supernova explosion for the first time! [ UC Press Release ]

"Three-Dimensional Simulations of the Deflagration Phase of the Gravitationally Confined Detonation Model of Type Ia Supernovae"
Jordan et al., 2007 [ paper ]

Movies

Each dataset has two movies of a 6 km resolution 3D type Ia simulation.
For each dataset one movie shows the density and the reaction progress variable
(under the sub-directory "rpv1") and the other shows density and temperature
(under the sub-directory "temp").

Dataset 1: 18 km initial bubble radius, 42 km ignition offset [ movies ]
Dataset 2: 25 km initial bubble radius, 100 km ignition offset [ movies ]

If you prefer a movie without a colormap legend please click here: Movies without labels

Additional Articles on first 3D type Ia supernova explosion:

Chicago Sun-Times, "Star 'blown up' by U. of C. team" [ More ]

HPCwire, "Scientists Compute Death Throes of White Dwarf Star" [ More ]

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory: News Release,
"Computer scientists at Lawrence Livermore assist in ground breaking simulation of white dwarf star exploding" [ More ]

Department of Energy, Office of Science, ASCR Press Release,
"Scientists Compute Death Throes of White Dwarf Star in 3D Simulations Using Department of Energy Supercomputers" [ More ]

MSNBC.com, SPACE.com, "Wow! Astronomers Explode a Virtual Star" [ MSNBC.com ] [ SPACE.com ]

NewScientist.com, "At last, virtual stars go kaboom on cue" [ More ]

WBEZ.org, Chicago Public Radio, "Blowing up Stars for Science Sake" [ More ]

Astronomy.com, "How to incinerate a White Dwarf" [ More ]

Our Center - the "FLASH Center" - is funded by the DOE ASC/Alliances Program to build a state-of-the-art simulator code for solving nuclear astrophysical problems related to exploding stars. This website contains information about the astrophysics, the code, and related basic physics and computer science efforts. Please follow the appropriate links.

We also distribute the FLASH code. Procedure and conditions are described on the Code Request Page.

All publications resulting from the use of the FLASH Code must acknowledge the ASC / Alliance Center for Astrophysical Thermonuclear Flashes.

Addition of the following text to the paper acknowledgments will be sufficient:

"The software used in this work was in part developed by the DOE-supported ASC / Alliance Center for Astrophysical Thermonuclear Flashes at the University of Chicago."

Simulation of an initially planar shock

Simulation of an initially planar shock passing through a two-layer target composed of copper and plastic with a sinusoidal interface between the two materials. The reddish spikes in the center of the image are copper, and the perturbed shock is to the right of the spikes.

ASC / Alliance Centerfor Astrophysical Thermonuclear Flashes

Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC)Academic Strategic Alliances Program (ASAP) Center