Simulations of standard candles will help astrophysicists
understand dark energy Understanding a Type Ia supernova—an
exploding white dwarf star—requires supercomputers. A team of
astrophysicists and computational scientists is using the power
of Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s (ORNL’s) Jaguar to virtually
blow up these white dwarfs. In the process the researchers are
revealing the secrets of the biggest thermonuclear explosions in
the universe and finding the answers needed to measure the size
of the universe. “The physics of supernova explosions is
something astrophysicists have been trying to figure out for
about 50 years now,” said Stan Woosley, principal investigator
of an Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and
Experiment (INCITE) project and professor of astrophysics at the
University of California–Santa Cruz. “It is an interesting
physics problem in turbulent combustion, but it is also
important because—as the 2011 Nobel Prize attested—Type Ia
supernovae can be used to show that the ex