A Suite of Exploding Stars

A research team led by Adam Burrows, Member in the School of Natural Sciences, has created the largest collection yet of state-of-the-art, three-dimensional core-collapse supernova simulations.

"The image above shows the results of several of the team’s simulations, showcasing the wide variety of structures and sizes attained by exploding stars just a few seconds after the stars’ outer layers rebounded off their collapsed cores. The smooth outer blue bubble shows the location of the expanding shock, while the more complex inner bubbles show the location of the ejected material. Red material is moving outward and blue material is moving inward. These simulations, which follow the collapse of stars with masses between 9 and 60 solar masses, allowed the team to find correlations between the properties of the explosions and the properties of the stars they came from."