Northwestern researchers develop a simulation highlighting the evolution of a collapsing star

A team of Northwestern astrophysicists has developed the first-ever full 3D simulation of a “collapstar” — the entire evolution of a jet formed by a collapsing star. The paper was published on June 29 in Astrophysical Journal Letters and featured the highest ever resolution simulation of a large-scale jet.

Due to the complexity of such a task, previous simulations have been unable to capture the full evolution of a jet’s life cycle. However, the newly developed simulation is so powerful because of its reliance on graphical processing units (GPUs) instead of central processing units (CPUs). Using supercomputers at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, researchers were able to take advantage of the GPUs extremely efficient computer graphics and image processing.

The study was led by Ore Gottlieb, a Rothschild Fellow in Northwestern’s Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA). He coauthored the paper with CIERA member Sasha Tchekhovskoy, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Weinberg.

“Studying jets enables us to ‘see’ what happens deep inside the star as it collapses,” Gottlieb said. “Otherwise, it’s difficult to learn what happens in a collapsed star because light cannot escape from the stellar interior. But we can learn from the jet emission — the history of the jet and the information that it carries from the systems that launch them.”

Learn more in Northwestern Now’s article, “Falling stardust, wobbly jets explain blinking gamma ray bursts.”