Astronomers Explode Virtual Supernova 97
DynaSoar writes "Scientists at the University of Chicago's Center for Astrophysical Thermonuclear Flashes have created a simulation of a white dwarf exploding into a type 1a supernova. Using 700 processors and 58,000 hours, they produced a three second movie showing the initial burst that is thought to be the source of much of the iron in the universe. Understanding these supernovas is also important to testing current cosmological theories regarding dark matter and dark energy, as their brightness is used as a measurement of distance, and discrepancies found in the brightness of very distant supernovas consistently seem to indicate a change in the speed of expansion of the universe over time."
Nice blanket statement (Score:3, Insightful)
Bob: But we'll never get funding with a three second image. This thing had to have caused something useful .. ... how about something specific like Kevin Federline?
Joe: Well, um
Bob: No, panders too much to popular culture.
Joe: That's too bad because my next thought was heavy metal music. Oh, how about some type of boring "metal" like iron ore. It's in some vitamins too which will interest the average consumer.
Bob: That'll do. We have to get the funding proposal out by noon.
Re:58000 hours (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Well that's all fine and good.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Knowledge for knowledge's sake ALWAYS ends up paying off.
Just because we dont know how to make our lives better by virtue of gaining this knowledge now, there's no reason to suppose we'll never know (in fact, history indicates that eventually ALL research pays off to some extent).
If you RTFA and do a slight bit of reasoning (I know, I know, but try), you will see that this research directly helps us understand more of the hydrogen -> helium mechanincs.
Repeat after me:
ALL KNOWLEDGE IS VALUABLE.
KNOWING IS ALWAYS BETTER THAN NOT KNOWING.
Ignorance being bliss was a concept invented to placate the ignorant.
Re:Well that's all fine and good.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Further development in materials and energy sources today relies upon gaining a better understanding of the physics involved. After all, it's hard to do engineering when you don't know the rules. While we have very good models for large-scale physics, we're still lacking at the subatomic level.
The difficulty of subatomic physics is that the particles are so small that their influences are difficult to detect. One way to solve that is to accelerate them to very large energies, high enough that we could notice a single quark out of place. That's the principle of a particle accelerator.
The problem is that we can only get so much energy, and on a small scale, with our puny devices here on Earth. Out there in space, some processes have way more energy than we could ever harness, so we can learn important things about physics just by watching. The reason to simulate a supernova is so that we know what we should expect given our current models. Likely, observation of actual supernovas is going to show discrepancies with the simulation, and those discrepancies will be grounds for further research to improve our models.