4 research outputs found
Models for Type Ia supernovae and related astrophysical transients
We give an overview of recent efforts to model Type Ia supernovae and related
astrophysical transients resulting from thermonuclear explosions in white
dwarfs. In particular we point out the challenges resulting from the
multi-physics multi-scale nature of the problem and discuss possible numerical
approaches to meet them in hydrodynamical explosion simulations and radiative
transfer modeling. We give examples of how these methods are applied to several
explosion scenarios that have been proposed to explain distinct subsets or, in
some cases, the majority of the observed events. In case we comment on some of
the successes and shortcoming of these scenarios and highlight important
outstanding issues.Comment: 20 pages, 2 figures, review published in Space Science Reviews as
part of the topical collection on supernovae, replacement corrects typos in
the conclusions sectio
Monte Carlo radiation hydrodynamics:Methods, tests and application to Type Ia supernova ejecta
In astrophysical systems, radiation-matter interactions are important in transferring energy and momentum between the radiation field and the surrounding material. This coupling often makes it necessary to consider the role of radiation when modelling the dynamics of astrophysical fluids. During the last few years, there have been rapid developments in the use of Monte Carlo methods for numerical radiative transfer simulations. Here, we present an approach to radiation hydrodynamics that is based on coupling Monte Carlo radiative transfer techniques with finite-volume hydrodynamical methods in an operator-split manner. In particular, we adopt an indivisible packet formalism to discretize the radiation field into an ensemble of Monte Carlo packets and employ volume-based estimators to reconstruct the radiation field characteristics. In this paper the numerical tools of this method are presented and their accuracy is verified in a series of test calculations. Finally, as a practical example, we use our approach to study the influence of the radiation-matter coupling on the homologous expansion phase and the bolometric light curve of Type Ia supernova explosions