Kristian Vitovsky   (Czech Republic)

kristian.vitovsky @ h-its.org

Simulations of Hydrodynamic Flows in Stellar Interiors

Until the end of the last millennium, stellar interiors remained hidden from almost all observations and hence our understanding of their structure and evolution was significantly limited. Today, precise measurements of a star’s brightness variation that are caused by waves propagating through the interior place valuable constraints on the internal structure of the star.

Studying these waves is the aim of Asteroseismology, which typically uses spherically-symmetric stellar models that rely on simplified, parametrised physics. However, these assumptions need verification and improvements from self-consistent but more computationally expensive 3D hydrodynamical (or even MHD) simulations.

For example, the multifaceted forms of convection within stars, which excite these waves, are inherently a multidimensional processes and cannot be accurately captured by 1D models. In my work, I study convection and the internal gravity waves it generates by performing 3D hydrodynamical simulations using the Seven-League Hydro code developed in our group, that is optimised for low Mach number flows.

Supervisor:    Friedrich Roepke  (HITS)