Huge star explosions give clues to life’s origins
Posted July 2, 2007
How, from the primordial Big Bang eons ago, were the building blocks of life created?
Over the past several centuries scientists have pried loose some clues, but a definitive answer has yet to be found.
That may soon change, thanks to collaboration between Department of Energy and university scientists.
 Hubble Space Telescope image of remnants of supernova 1987A |
The final revelation of the source of life’s core elements could come from their investigation of what astrophysicists call core-collapse supernovae – the deaths of massive stars.
“Understanding how massive stars die is a key link in the chain of origin from the Big Bang to us, which is tantamount to understanding how we came to be in the universe,” explains project head Anthony Mezzacappa, a corporate fellow at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. That makes it “one of the most important unsolved problems in astrophysics.”
Core-collapse supernovae are the most energetic events in the cosmos and are responsible for the chemistry and thermal evolution of the universe. They are, in essence, responsible for the atoms that make up our bodies as well as the rest of the material universe.
Core-collapse supernovae start with stars at least eight times the size of our sun. Radiation from these stars drive powerful “winds.” The solar wind from our sun, by comparison, produces dramatic aurora borealis, or northern lights, when it strikes Earth’s magnetic fields. Solar winds from massive stars are many times more energetic.
Since exploding stars cannot be reproduced on Earth and the type of matter that remains after a star dies doesn’t exist on our planet, DOE researchers use supercomputers to model and study core-collapse supernova explosions.
The group uses Oak Ridge’s Jaguar, a Cray XT3/4, supported by DOE’s Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research.
Jaguar runs at 119 teraflops – 119 trillion calculations per second. This allows three-dimensional modeling of some of what happens during the death of a massive star, but a thorough simulation will require even bigger computers.
“The computational power required to simulate three-dimensional core-collapse supernovae events with all the physics will be at the multi-petaflops scale,” says Mezzacappa, who is an astrophysicist.
A petaflops is 1,000 teraflops, or a quadrillion calculations per second – that’s a 1 followed by 15 zeroes. Mezzacappa expects the DOE to have that capability within five years.
Such a potent computer, coupled with astronomical observation, would give researchers a virtual cosmic laboratory. They could study fundamental nuclear particle physics in a way that’s impossible with terrestrial experiments.
