New insights were gained, thanks to the Department of Energy’s Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Neutron stars are formed from the cataclysmic collapse and subsequent explosion of massive stars. They are among the universe’s most extreme and enigmatic cosmic laboratories, offering unique insights into the fundamental forces of nature.
Neutron stars are incredibly difficult to decipher. Experts can’t recreate their extreme conditions in a lab, and the closest one is 400 light-years away – too distant for detailed telescopic observation.So, how do astrophysicists peer into these cosmic enigmas?They turn to the power of supercomputers. And recently, new insights were gained, thanks to the Department of Energy’s Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.“Neutron stars are superdense environments, about which we know some things but not very much. It’s not a form of matter that we can create in laboratories and test, but it’s something we can try and make theoretical predictions about,” said William Detmold, principal investigator for the project and a professor in MIT’s Department of Physics. Neutron star’s inner working Frontier is an exascale-class machine, capable of a quintillion – that’s a one followed by 18 zeros – calculations per second.This immense power allowed a team from MIT to study particle systems on an unprecedented scale, revealing new clues about the inner workings of neutron stars.An unanswered question about neutron stars is their “equation of state,” which describes the relationship between their density, temperature, and internal pressure. Determining this equation is vital to predict the maximum possible mass a neutron star can attain, a limit set by the balance between its immense gravity and internal pressure. It also hints at the subatomic composition of these bizarre objects.The MIT team focused on something called “isospin density.” Neutron stars are overwhelmingly composed of neutrons. This extreme imbalance means they have a significant non-zero isospin density.“What we basically did in this project was calculate how changing the isospin density affects the matter that we see. For the first time, we have been able to map out how the pressure changes as you change this density. We now really have the equation of state mapped out across this entire density axis,” Detmold said.Computing power of Frontier This property is vital because it reveals how the fundamental particles within protons and neutrons—quarks and gluons—behave under the extreme conditions of a neutron star. Quantum Chromodynamics is the theory describing the strong force, which is responsible for binding quarks and gluons.Solving its complex equations requires massive computational power, using an approach called “lattice QCD,” which defines these particles on a 4D space-time grid. “Key components of these lattice QCD calculations are called quark propagators, which encode the probabilities of quarks moving from one place to another. If you were to write these out as entries in a matrix, the matrices would be something like 10 to the 10th by 10 to the 10th, which is very large,” Detmold said.The process involved eight months of continuous computing on Frontier to generate “snapshots” of quark and gluon configurations using specialized software. The MIT team then developed a new algorithm to efficiently invert and combine these massive data sets into smaller, analyzable matrices.The MIT team’s findings contribute significantly to understanding neutron stars’ equation of state, enabling astrophysicists to better predict their internal conditions. As direct observation isn’t possible, this research is crucial for making testable predictions about the potential presence of exotic quark matter within these stars.The findings were published in the journal Physical Review Letters.
Frontier Neutron Neutron Star Oak Ridge National Laboratory ORNL Space Supercomputer
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