The danger of nearby supernova and the protective power of solar wind
(group 8)
Members: Rashi (Input Person), Raditya (Analysis Person), Alex B. (Code Person)
Procedure
1d: steady cloud of gas
1d: hit it with supernova shock / plain wave
1d: add source → turn cloud into wind
move to 2d
parametric study: What is the kill radius at given explosion energy and solar wind strength?
production of the “Battle of the Winds” movie blockbuster
Logbook
Date: 06/02/2014
1d version of steady cloud of gas created using the following parameters:
Pressure : pcloud = 1
Density : rcloud = 1
Velocity : ucloud = 0
Ambient density : ramb = 1e-04
Then we created a 1d shock wave and let it hit the cloud using the following parameters:
Pressure : pshock = 10000
Density : rshock = 0.5
Velocity : vshock = 0
Having succesfully performed the above two steps, we replced the steady cloud of gas with a source generating outgoing mass flow which basically represents 1d version of the solar wind. For the same, we introduced a velocity of 5 at the center in two oppisite directions and a density of 2.
Finally we ended the day with hitting the shock wave onto the solar wind to see the interaction beteen the two.
Date : 06/03/2014
All 3 of us installed netcdf and got the Serial version of VH1 running. Alex worked on setting up the 2D code for the solar wind and the supernova shock.
Myself and Raditya, figured out the input parameters for the problem using Brian Field's paper on “Supernova Collisions with the Heliosphere”. We tested those parameters on the 1D set-up for the problem, basically we replaced the random numbers we used on 06/02 with real numbers describing the problem in 1D format.
The resulting density, pressure and velocity plots in 1D looked reasonably good. So we gave those parameters to Alex to be used into the 2D code.
Date : 06/04/2014
Changed the 2D inputs to more natural units ([L]=1 AU, [T]=1 yr, [M]=10^12 g) because VH-1 would crash when using the cgs system for our problem.
Fixed an error in our input densities.
Fixed the bug of density accumulating on the symmetry axis (we use cylindrical coordinates) by setting the density of the two innermost gridpoints in each column to the value of the third. This is a quick and dirty fix and unphysical! However, we think the problem is caused by some boundary condition/ghost zone issue that we were not able to resolve after spending several hours on it. We thank Richard for suggesting this fix!
Finally running a realistic simulation of the collision, now we are all set for producing a high-res video and a low-res parameter study tomorrow.
Date : 06/05/2014
Finalized our input parameters
Generated high-res simulations (10×4 AU, 750×250 gridpoints) for the presentation
Did a parameter study on a reduced grid (6×2 AU, 300×100 gridpoints) to determine the dependence of the penetration radius on the densities of the SNR and solar wind.
Figured out how to create animated gifs / videos of the NetCDF files using VisIt
Created our presentation
group8.1402023693.txt.gz · Last modified: 2014/06/05 23:01 by bartl