Massive stars produce so much light that the radiation pressure they exert on the gas and dust around them is stronger than their gravitational attraction, a condition that has long been expected to prevent them from growing by accretion. We present three-dimensional radiation-hydrodynamic simulations of the collapse of a massive prestellar core and find that radiation pressure does not halt ac...

We present results from an extensive survey of 64 cavities in the X-ray halos of clusters, groups and normal elliptical galaxies. We show that the evolution of the size of the cavities as they rise in the X-ray atmosphere is inconsistent with the standard model of adiabatic expansion of purely hydrodynamic models. We also note that the majority of the observed bubbles should have already been s...

Implosion process in laser fusion can be divided into three phases: start-up, acceleration and stagnation phases and various hydrodynamic instabilities appear in each phase. Analytical models are developed to study nonlinear evolutions of the hydrodynamic instabilities in these phases, and compared with multi-dimensional simulations. We mainly discuss the formation of double spiral structures c...

Though it is agreed that the post–bounce, pre–explosion cores of massive stars are unstable to transonic, Rayleigh–Taylor–like instabilities, the role convective motions may play in igniting the supernova explosion itself is not yet clear. Whatever that role, the morphology and nucleosynthetic yields of the explosion, the recoil of the protoneutron star, the spatial distribution of fresh Ni, an...

We extend our earlier model for Rayleigh-Taylor and Richtmyer-Meshkov instabilities to the more general class of hydrodynamic instabilities driven by a time-dependent acceleration g(t). Explicit analytic solutions for linear as well as nonlinear amplitudes are obtained for several g(t)s by solving a Schrödinger-like equation d(2)eta/dt(2)-g(t)kAeta=0, where A is the Atwood number and k is the w...

A volume penalization approach to simulate magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) flows in confined domains is presented. Here the incompressible visco-resistive MHD equations are solved using parallel pseudo-spectral solvers in Cartesian geometries. The volume penalization technique is an immersed boundary method which is characterized by a high flexibility for the geometry of the considered flow. In the p...

In order to understand star formation it is important to understand the dynamics of atomic and molecular clouds in the interstellar medium (ISM). Nonlinear hydrodynamic flows are a key component to the ISM. One route by which nonlinear flows arise is the onset and evolution of interfacial instabilities. Interfacial instabilities act to modify the interface between gas components at different de...

A volume penalization approach to simulate magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) flows in confined domains is presented. Here the incompressible visco-resistive MHD equations are solved using parallel pseudo-spectral solvers in Cartesian geometries. The volume penalization technique is an immersed boundary method which is characterized by a high flexibility for the geometry of the considered flow. In the p...

Supernovae of type Ia (SNe Ia) are very important for cosmography. To exclude systematic effects in linking the observed light of distant SNe Ia to the parameters of cosmological models, one has to understand the nature of supernova outbursts and to build accurate algorithms for predicting their emission. We review the recent progress of modeling the propagation of nuclear flame subject to nume...