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Bursts of stellar turbulence
This still depicts a 3D mixing layer between two fluids of different densities in a gravitational field. Known as Rayleigh-Taylor instability -- a type of turbulent mixing that occurs due to gravity, when a heavy gas is on top of a lighter one -- this mixing plays an essential role in stellar convection.
[Numerical simulations were performed on the Cray XT3 at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. Visualization of the output data was performed at the University of Minnesota's Laboratory for Computational Science and Engineering on equipment purchased with support of U.S. National Science Foundation grants CNS 0421423 and CNS 0708822.]
This research was highlighted in the writeup "Bursts of Stellar Turbulence" from the PSC Projects in Scientific Computing 2007 Annual Report. (Date of Image: 2007)
Credit: Prof. Paul Woodward, Laboratory for Computational Science and Engineering, University of Minnesota
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