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Image: Vorticity and turbulence are mainly confined to the intergranular lanes and downdrafts. <I>[Image 4 of 4 related images; see also, Solar Convection and Entropy, Entropy Fluctuations, and Solar Granulation.]</I><BR> <BR> <U><B>More about this Image</B></U><BR> Robert Stein, a physics and astronomy professor at Michigan State University, and Aake Nordlund of Copenhagen University Observatory in Denmark, used the National Computational Science Alliance’s SGI Origin2000 supercomputer, located at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), to create massive models of portions of the sun to simulate the processes behind the sun’s smaller-scale features. Using these models, the team focused on understanding convection and magnetic flux near the solar surface. Stein and Nordlund have used supercomputers to study the nature of the sun for more than 15 years.<BR> <BR> Rather than create the simulation through a variety of modeling applications, the team uses a single, integrated code. Their code is based on the laws of conservation of mass, momentum, and energy as well as the forces of pressure, gravity, and the magnetic field. Solving the equations that represent these laws and forces allows the researchers to see the essential physics at work, the radiative cooling at the surface that drives convection and the turbulent motions that generate small-scale magnetic fields and shuffle them around, for example.<BR> <BR> On four to six Origin2000 processors, it takes about one day to simulate 30 seconds of time on the sun. Eventually, they hope to simulate about one day on the Sun.<BR> <BR> Using the team’s newest simulations, they hope to learn how much small-scale magnetic flux is generated by convection, how larger-scale structures are related to granulation, and how to calibrate sound waves to observe phenomena near the solar surface.<BR> <BR> This work was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (grants AST 95-21785 and AST 98-19799), NASA, and the Danish Research Council.<BR> Thumbnail

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