Dr. Robert Rosner
Director of Argonne National Laboratory

Abstract:

Although Type Ia supernovae are an important part of the 'distance ladder' used to establish cosmological distance and time scales, the physics underlying the associated nuclear detonations has long been poorly understood. The key problem is to understand how nuclear flames accelerate; and I will use this problem to illustrate how numerical simulations, together with analytical calculations, can be used to elucidate this puzzle.