Toward simulating Black Widow binaries with CASTRO

Alan Calder, SUNY at Stony Brook

Usage Details

The team will perform preliminary simulations of Black Widow binaries, systems in which radiation from a millisecond pulsar ablates and eventually destroys a companion star. The simulations will be performed with the adaptive-mesh astrophysical simulation code CASTRO. The newly-implemented radiation hydro-dynamics module for CASTRO is capable of only diffusive transport, which is not sufficient for the black widow problem, but preliminary simulations will yield important information about the relevant hydrodynamic and radiation hydrodynamic time scales and allow us to construct initial models.