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Simulating The Cosmos With AstroBEAR

<a href="http://www.spacetelescope.org/news/heic1113/">Hubble Space Telescope images</a> capture the energetic salvos of blobby material ejected episodically by young stars that are the signposts of stellar birth. The ejected material zips along at more than 700,000 kilometers per hour.
P. Hartigan (Rice University)
/
NASA/ESA
Hubble Space Telescope images capture the energetic salvos of blobby material ejected episodically by young stars that are the signposts of stellar birth. The ejected material zips along at more than 700,000 kilometers per hour.

So all of us here at 13.7 Cosmos and Culture have day jobs. Much as we love exploring the big topics of life, the universe and ... um ... the meaning of zombie movies for NPR, we have academic jobs, too. In honor of the last week of summer (and finishing all my summer science projects before classes begin), I thought it might be nice to give folks a glimpse into what our computational research group does here at the University of Rochester.

I could write a whole bunch of text to describe our development of advanced supercomputer tools for simulating astrophysical flows. Luckily, I don't have to because we recently completed a nice six-minute video describing AstroBEAR 2.0. That's the cute name given to the adaptive mesh refinement and magneto-hydrodynamics (your new words for the day) computer code we've just finished and made available to other researchers.

The development of this code took many years and the hard work of many graduate students, some of whom you will see in the video (made by the ). Also, funding for the development of this tool for studying how stars form, and how they die, came from you via the National Science Foundation, NASA and the Department of Energy. Thanks!


You can keep up with more of what Adam Frank is thinking onFacebookand on Twitter:@AdamFrank4

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Adam Frank was a contributor to the NPR blog 13.7: Cosmos & Culture. A professor at the University of Rochester, Frank is a theoretical/computational astrophysicist and currently heads a research group developing supercomputer code to study the formation and death of stars. Frank's research has also explored the evolution of newly born planets and the structure of clouds in the interstellar medium. Recently, he has begun work in the fields of astrobiology and network theory/data science. Frank also holds a joint appointment at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics, a Department of Energy fusion lab.

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