Robert Fisher and Cal Jordan of the Flash Center are among a team of scientists who will expend 22 million computational hours during the next year on the Blue Gene/P supercomputer at Argonne National Laboratory. The Flash Center will devote its computer allocation to studying Type Ia supernovas, in which temperatures reach billions of degrees.
Understanding Type Ia supernovas is critical to solving the mystery of dark energy, which is somehow causing the universe to expand at an accelerating rate. All Type Ia supernovas display approximately the same brightness, allowing scientists to assess the distance of the exploding stars' home galaxies accordingly. Nevertheless, these supernovas display a variation of approximately 15 percent. "To really understand dark energy, you have to nail this variation to about 1 percent," said Jordan.
The density of white dwarf stars, from which Type Ia supernovas evolve, is equally extreme. "If one were able to scoop out a cubic centimeter - roughly a teaspoon - of material from that white dwarf, it would weigh a thousand metric tons," Fisher explained. Through over a thousand different simulations at Argonne, the team will analyze how burning in a white dwarf occurs in four possible scenarios that lead to Type Ia supernovas.
