From Convection to Explosion: End-to-End Simulation of Type Ia Supernovae

TL;DR

This paper introduces an integrated simulation approach for modeling the entire process of Type Ia supernovae, from convection to explosion, using advanced adaptive mesh refinement codes for high-resolution 3D star simulations.

Contribution

We developed an end-to-end simulation framework combining MAESTRO and CASTRO codes, enabling detailed 3D modeling of supernova ignition and explosion phases with high scalability.

Findings

First-ever 3D convection simulations preceding ignition.

Successful initialization of explosion simulations from convection data.

Demonstrated scalability to over 100,000 cores.

Abstract

We present our end-to-end capability for computing the convective phase through the explosion phase of Type Ia supernovae. We compute the convective phase up to the time of ignition using our low Mach number code, MAESTRO, and the subsequent explosion phase using our compressible code, CASTRO. Both codes share the same BoxLib software framework and use finite-volume, block-structured adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) to enable high-resolution, three-dimensional full-star simulations that scale to 100,000+ cores. We present preliminary results from the first-ever simulations of convection preceding ignition using MAESTRO with AMR. We also demonstrate our ability to initialize a compressible simulation of the explosion phase in CASTRO using data obtained directly from MAESTRO just before ignition. Some care must be taken during this initialization procedure when interpreting the size and distribution of hot spots.