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L. J. Dursi, J. Truran, M. Zingale, A. C. Calder, B. Fryxell, K. Olson, P. Ricker, R. Rosner, F. X. Timmes, H. M. Tufo (Univ. of Chicago), P. MacNeice (NASA/GSFC)
A nova is a thought to result from a partially degenerate thermonuclear runaway on the surface of a white dwarf. Material from the underlying white dwarf must be dredged up into the atmosphere in order to produce an explosion with the observed energies; the carbon and oxygen serve as catalysts for the hydrogen burning, allowing the much more temperature-sensitive CNO burning to occur.
In order to understand this dredge-up problem, we are running two different types of simulations. The first are large-scale simulations with the FLASH code (Fryxell et al., 2000), using a one-dimensional set of initial conditions of a nova about to undergo runaway created by Ami Glasner. These initial conditions have been used in previous multidimensional simulations (Glasner et al. 1997; Kercek et al. 1998), but these simulations have given widely different results because of different mixing behaviors in the two codes. Our set of simulations will shed some light on this discrepancy; since our code has adaptive mesh refinement (MacNeice et al., 2000), we can afford to highly refine the region of the star where the mixing occurs, without the cost of highly refining the entire region.
Because these large-scale computations are extremely compute-intensive, they are not appropriate for broad exploration of initial conditions. To do this, we use a One-Dimensional Turbulence (ODT) model which has been used in astrophysical models previously (Niemeyer & Kerstein, 1997). This allows us to use ODT simulations of the nova as experiments to guide us to interesting regimes to study further with multidimensional FLASH code simulations. This work was supported in part by the Department of Energy Grant No. B341495 to the Center for Astrophysical Thermonuclear Flashes at the University of Chicago under the ASCI Strategic Alliances Program and by NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
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The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: ljdursi@flash.uchicago.edu