Simulation movies
Watching a massive star fight its own light
Four radiation-hydrodynamic runs following the collapse of a 150 M☉ pre-stellar core. They differ in one thing each — resolution, radiation method, or initial turbulence — which is what makes it possible to say which features are physical and which are numerical.
The runs
LamRT+FLDhybrid radiative transfer, laminar initial conditions
Adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) simulation of the collapse of a 150 M☉ laminar core with 20 AU maximum resolution and hybrid radiative transfer.
Watch the movieLamRT+FLD_LRlow-resolution comparison run
Low-resolution AMR simulation of the collapse of a 150 M☉ laminar core with 40 AU maximum resolution and hybrid radiative transfer. Bubble shells are no longer adaptively refined, to show that instabilities developing at bubble shells must be resolved in order to grow.
Watch the movieLamFLDFLD-only comparison run
AMR simulation of the collapse of a 150 M☉ laminar core with 20 AU maximum resolution, using only the flux-limited diffusion (FLD) approximation for radiative transfer.
Watch the movieTurbRT+FLDhybrid radiative transfer, turbulent initial conditions
AMR simulation of the collapse of a 150 M☉ turbulent core with 20 AU maximum resolution and hybrid radiative transfer.
Watch the movie
The papers behind them
The simulations shown on this page.
An Unstable Truth: How Massive Stars get their Mass
The radiation method these runs use.
HARM²: A Highly Parallel Method for Radiation Hydrodynamics on Adaptive Grids
This is early work — my thesis-era massive-star-formation simulations. The questions it opened are on the research page, and the full record is in publications.