Research Symposium

BIO

My name is Michael Davis, I am pursuing a career in medicine, and I have a strong passion for mathematics and astronomy.

Understanding Properties of Type Ia Supernova Flames

Abstract

Type Ia supernovae are valued for their scalable absolute luminosities being revolutionary for distance astronomy. Though widely used, the structures of their stellar progenitors are not well understood. We will construct an approximate flame speed formula for flame and explosion studies using MESA code and by probing parameter space. Our results consist of sets of MESA runs simulating flames for conditions expected of progenitor stars. Our simulation results show strong dependencies of flame parameters. We have many people, six, running simulations such that the difference between the approximate solution and the true solution decreases. In the future, we recommend using larger nuclear networks, as our model employs a relatively simple nuclear network with 21 isotopes.

Keywords: Astronomy, Astrophysics, Computational