杏吧原创

THE guts of an exploding star can now be visualised almost instantly in glorious detail.

Astronomers often use supercomputers to simulate how a supernova evolves, generating vast amounts of data. Seeing their results visually used to involve transferring the data to a normal computer, but this took weeks to generate graphics. 鈥淭his kind of visualisation allows us to make most of the gas transparent and zero in on only the most interesting features,鈥� says at North Carolina State University in Raleigh.

Now the supercomputer at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois can create visualisations in minutes. The image above shows the first half-second after the collapse of a star鈥檚 core, says Blondin. The colours represent the values of the internal energy of the gases. The solid gold, for instance, marks a particularly strong wave.

Creating these images so quickly is 鈥渁 tremendous breakthrough鈥�, says Robert Fisher of the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth.