Richers et al., arXiv:1701.02752 carried out more than 1800 axisymmetric general-relativistic simulations of rotating core collapse, using 18 different nuclear equations of state. The gravitational waveforms are available here on stellarcollapse.org!

We have released version 1.01 of SNEC -- it's available for download from stellarcollapse.org/SNEC. SNEC 1.01 implements the same physics as SNEC 1.00, but is about a factor of two faster thanks to various optimizations.

Our new paper led by Sebastiano Bernuzzi is out in Physical Review D! The paper is about a large set of neutron star merger simulations, using three different finite-temperature nuclear equation of state and binary parameters motivated by the galactic double neutron star population. Our focus was on how "loud" these mergers are in gravitational waves and what phase of their evolution is the "loudest".

Also exciting: We are providing open access to the gravitational waveforms extracted from our merger simulations. For details, see: https://stellarcollapse.org/Bernuzzi2016. Here is the money plot from the paper:

This figure shows that most of the gravitational wave energy in the entire history of a coalescing neutron star binary is actually emitted in the first ~10 ms after merger

Jim Lattimer has been so kind to provide us with an updated version of his observed neutron star masses table. See here: https://stellarcollapse.org/nsmasses

New paper by Viktoriya Morozova, Tony Piro, Mathieu Renzo, Christian Ott:

"Numerical Modeling of the Early Light Curves of Type IIP Supernovae", submitted to ApJ, arXiv:1603.08530.

We show, using SNEC, that there is a tight correlation between Type IIP (plateau) core-collapse supernova rise times (in g-band) and the radii of their progenitor red supergiant stars. See below figure! SNEC and all inputs to our models are available as part of our open-science initiative here on stellarcollapse.org: https://stellarcollapse.org/Morozova2016

 

The One-Armed Spiral Instability in Neutron Star Mergers and its Detectability in Gravitational Waves

Radice, Bernuzzi, & Ott, arXiv:1603.05726, read more here: https://stellarcollapse.org/BNSm1

Welcome to the new stellarcollapse.org! We just completed the move to a new server with faster CPUs and more disk space. We have upgraded the content management system from Drupal 6 to Drupal 8. Stay tuned for more simulation results that will appear soon on stellarcollapse.org!

Please contact Christian Ott at cott #at# tapir.caltech.edu if you notice any problems with the site.

Mösta et al. recently published a break-through study on magnetoturbulence in rapidly rotating stellar collapse in Nature. They show that magnetohydrodynamic turbulence in the shear layer around a newly born proto-neutron star kicks off a highly efficient dynamo process that creates large-scale, ordered magnetar-strength (> 10^15 G) magnetic field. This field is strong enough to power hyperenergetic type Ic-bl explosions, a rare but extreme subclass of core-collapse supernovae, that are 10x more energetic than the average garden-variety supernovae and also make up all supernovae connected to long gamma-ray bursts. In addition, their simulations provide a first glimpse on a formation scenario for magnetars, very strongly magnetized neutron stars, that are left behind in these explosions.

The source code used to run the simulations and the initial data are available here. They have also created 3D visualizations of the magnetic field amplification in their simulations, embedded below.