Details
Organizers: Adam Burrows, Frans Pretorius, Anatoly Spitkovsky, Branson Stephens, Jim Stone
Relativistic Astrophysics is experiencing an explosion in the quality of data and the level of sophistication of the modeling. Broadly defined, relativistic astrophysics studies phenomena for which the effects of Einstein’s theory of relativity play a crucial role in determining the observables. Examples include relativistic motion of astrophysical jets, accretion onto black holes, formation and mergers of neutron stars and black holes, supernova explosions, and the acceleration of cosmic rays. For the next several years we expect a unique confluence of simultaneous observations from ground and space-based telescopes that span the whole electromagnetic spectrum: VLA (radio), Hubble/JWST (optical/infrared), Chandra, XMM, SWIFT, NuStar (X-rays), GLAST (gamma-rays), and HESS/MAGIC (multi-TeV gamma-rays). These facilities will be combined with the qualitatively new windows provided by particle astronomy via cosmic rays (Auger) and neutrinos (IceCube), and gravitational wave astronomy with LIGO.
Theoretical understanding of the extreme environments of relativistic astrophysics is challenging due to the difficulties of modeling the nonlinear physical processes involved. Only recently, robust algorithms for relativistic magnetohydrodynamcs (RMHD) and for the solution of the Einstein equations have been developed and applied to astrophysics.
The goal of this program is to further the development and use of advanced numerical techniques for problems where both strong gravity and MHD are important, where strong magnetic fields determine the evolution, and where the models of relativistic microphysics are uncertain.
- PCTS
- D.E. Shaw & Co