No Arabic abstract
Many problems in stellar astrophysics feature flows at low Mach numbers. Conventional compressible hydrodynamics schemes frequently used in the field have been developed for the transonic regime and exhibit excessive numerical dissipation for these flows. While schemes were proposed that solve hydrodynamics strictly in the low Mach regime and thus restrict their applicability, we aim at developing a scheme that correctly operates in a wide range of Mach numbers. Based on an analysis of the asymptotic behavior of the Euler equations in the low Mach limit we propose a novel scheme that is able to maintain a low Mach number flow setup while retaining all effects of compressibility. This is achieved by a suitable modification of the well-known Roe solver. Numerical tests demonstrate the capability of this new scheme to reproduce slow flow structures even in moderate numerical resolution. Our scheme provides a promising approach to a consistent multidimensional hydrodynamical treatment of astrophysical low Mach number problems such as convection, instabilities, and mixing in stellar evolution.
We present a multi-level solver for drawing constrained Gaussian realizations or finding the maximum likelihood estimate of the CMB sky, given noisy sky maps with partial sky coverage. The method converges substantially faster than existing Conjugate Gradient (CG) methods for the same problem. For instance, for the 143 GHz Planck frequency channel, only 3 multi-level W-cycles result in an absolute error smaller than 1 microKelvin in any pixel. Using 16 CPU cores, this translates to a computational expense of 6 minutes wall time per realization, plus 8 minutes wall time for a power spectrum-dependent precomputation. Each additional W-cycle reduces the error by more than an order of magnitude, at an additional computational cost of 2 minutes. For comparison, we have never been able to achieve similar absolute convergence with conventional CG methods for this high signal-to-noise data set, even after thousands of CG iterations and employing expensive preconditioners. The solver is part of the Commander 2 code, which is available with an open source license at http://commander.bitbucket.org/.
We present MultiModeCode, a Fortran 95/2000 package for the numerical exploration of multifield inflation models. This program facilitates efficient Monte Carlo sampling of prior probabilities for inflationary model parameters and initial conditions and is the first publicly available code that can efficiently generate large sample-sets for inflation models with $mathcal O(100)$ fields. The code numerically solves the equations of motion for the background and first-order perturbations of multi-field inflation models with canonical kinetic terms and arbitrary potentials, providing the adiabatic, isocurvature, and tensor power spectra at the end of inflation. For models with sum-separable potentials MultiModeCode also computes the slow-roll prediction via the $delta N$ formalism for easy model exploration and validation. We pay particular attention to the isocurvature perturbations as the system approaches the adiabatic limit, showing how to avoid numerical instabilities that affect some other approaches to this problem. We demonstrate the use of MultiModeCode by exploring a few toy models. Finally, we give a concise review of multifield perturbation theory and a users manual for the program.
We describe the structure and implementation of a moving-mesh hydrodynamics solver in the large-scale parallel code, Charm N-body GrAvity solver (ChaNGa). While largely based on the algorithm described by Springel (2010) that is implemented in AREPO, our algorithm differs a few aspects. We describe our use of the Voronoi tessellation library, VORO++, to compute the Voronoi tessellation directly. We also incorporate some recent advances in gradient estimation and reconstruction that gives better accuracy in hydrodynamic solutions at minimal computational cost. We validate this module with a small battery of test problems against the smooth particle hydrodynamics solver included in ChaNGa. Finally, we study one example of a scientific problem involving the mergers of two main sequence stars and highlight the small quantitative differences between smooth particle and moving-mesh hydrodynamics. We close with a discussion of anticipated future improvements and advancements.
NASAs WB-57 High Altitude Research Program provides a deployable, mobile, stratospheric platform for scientific research. Airborne platforms are of particular value for making coronal observations during total solar eclipses because of their ability both to follow the Moons shadow and to get above most of the atmospheric airmass that can interfere with astronomical observations. We used the 2017 Aug 21 eclipse as a pathfinding mission for high-altitude airborne solar astronomy, using the existing high-speed visible-light and near-/mid-wave infrared imaging suite mounted in the WB-57 nose cone. In this paper, we describe the aircraft, the instrument, and the 2017 mission; operations and data acquisition; and preliminary analysis of data quality from the existing instrument suite. We describe benefits and technical limitations of this platform for solar and other astronomical observations. We present a preliminary analysis of the visible-light data quality and discuss the limiting factors that must be overcome with future instrumentation. We conclude with a discussion of lessons learned from this pathfinding mission and prospects for future research at upcoming eclipses, as well as an evaluation of the capabilities of the WB-57 platform for future solar astronomy and general astronomical observation.
Accurate simulations of flows in stellar interiors are crucial to improving our understanding of stellar structure and evolution. Because the typically slow flows are merely tiny perturbations on top of a close balance between gravity and the pressure gradient, such simulations place heavy demands on numerical hydrodynamics schemes. We demonstrate how discretization errors on grids of reasonable size can lead to spurious flows orders of magnitude faster than the physical flow. Well-balanced numerical schemes can deal with this problem. Three such schemes were applied in the implicit, finite-volume Seven-League Hydro (SLH) code in combination with a low-Mach-number numerical flux function. We compare how the schemes perform in four numerical experiments addressing some of the challenges imposed by typical problems in stellar hydrodynamics. We find that the $alpha$-$beta$ and deviation well-balancing methods can accurately maintain hydrostatic solutions provided that gravitational potential energy is included in the total energy balance. They accurately conserve minuscule entropy fluctuations advected in an isentropic stratification, which enables the methods to reproduce the expected scaling of convective flow speed with the heating rate. The deviation method also substantially increases accuracy of maintaining stationary orbital motions in a Keplerian disk on long timescales. The Cargo-LeRoux method fares substantially worse in our tests, although its simplicity may still offer some merits in certain situations. Overall, we find the well-balanced treatment of gravity in combination with low Mach number flux functions essential to reproducing correct physical solutions to challenging stellar slow-flow problems on affordable collocated grids.