Our Crowdfunding Groups
A big thanks to all of our supporters who made this campaign a success- and our research possible! Though the campaign is complete, you can still support our supernova research here: www.asufoundation.org/SupernovaSuperlab. "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." -Carl Sagan
Did you know that supernovae deliver all the ingredients we need for planets, life, and everything else? Help us gain a better understanding of this natural phenomenon through running simulations on a supercomputer.
Top: Simulation of a supernova explosion (Ellinger & Young, ASU) Bottom: Cassiopeia A supernova remnant (NASA/CXC/SAO)
We are working to understand how the chemical elements that make up new stars, planets, and life are created in the explosive deaths of massive stars. We will be simulating these supernovae on massively parallel supercomputers with thousands of processors to capture the complexities of these dynamic events. We will model how structures form in the explosion, what they are made of, and how they mix with the nearby gas from which new solar systems are forming.One of Carl Sagan's most famous quotes is "We're made of starstuff." Everything we interact with everyday, from kittens to computers, are made of chemical elements forged in stars. One of the most profound goals of science today is to find life on planets outside our solar system. With almost 2000 extrasolar planets now known and more being discovered all the time we find that the diversity among these planets is greater than we ever imagined. We are working to understand how this diversity arises and how it affects the evolution of planets and their ability to support life and the signs of life we may be searching for in the next two decades.
