Turbulence Modelers Aim to Simulate Giant Stars

This slide depicts a Rayleigh-Taylor instability, a type of turbulent mixing that occurs due to gravity when a heavy gas is on top of a lighter one. Such mixing plays an essential role in stellar convection and is being studied in this context to help devise and validate statistical models of turbulent fluid mixing at the boundaries of convection zones in stars. The model shows a 3-D mixing layer between two fluids of different densities in a gravitational field. Paul Woodward and David Porter, both astrophysicists from the University of Minnesota's Laboratory for Computational Science and Engineering (LCSE), are using the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center's (PSC) Cray XT3 and PSC-developed software to run interactive simulations of turbulence.

Visit Website >

Image credit: Paul Woodward, Laboratory for Computational Science & Engineering, Univ. of Minnesota