The Challenges of Modeling Astrophysical Reactive Flows

Energy production in stellar environments is dominated by thermonuclear energy release, which can take place in quiet convective flows or explosive environments. Multidimensional models of astrophysical reactive flows have many challenges: capturing the relevant length and timescales, and keeping the different physics inputs coupled together over the course of the simulation. We will show applications to X-ray bursts, thermonuclear supernovae, and massive star evolution and discuss how algorithmic improvements and harnessing the power of GPUs has allowed us to make significant progress on understanding these astrophysical events, using our open source AMReX-Astrophysics suite of simulation codes.