Institute for Advanced Study Astrophysics Seminar

I will discuss a new method for analyzing the morphology of supernova remnants (SNRs) by using power specula analysis to diagnose the drivers responsible for structure at different angular scales. Using a suite of hydrodynamic models of the Rayleigh–Taylor instability (RTI) as a supernova (SN) collides with its surrounding medium we demonstrate how power spectral analysis can be used to attribute which scales in an SNR are driven by RTI and which must be caused by intrinsic asymmetries in the initial explosion. We predict the power spectrum of turbulence driven by RTI and identify a dominant angular mode that represents the largest scale that efficiently grows via RTI. I will discuss the implications of this work as well as our ongoing and future plans to use this methodology; comparing increasingly detailed SN models directly to observed remnant data.