Speaker
Ms
Maria Barrios Sazo
(Stony Brook University)
Description
A tight binary system in which a millisecond pulsar is ablating its low mass companion star is known as a Black Widow Pulsar (BWP) system. BWP systems have been observed in pulsar eclipses attributed to a cloud surrounding the evaporating companion star. We will describe the methods we are employing for modeling the interaction between the pulsar winds and the companion star. We are simulating the system using the radiation hydrodynamics code Castro. Castro is an adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) code, built on the BoxLib library. The code solves the compressible hydrodynamics equations for astrophysical flows with simultaneous refinement in space and time and supports a general equation of state, self-gravity, nuclear reactions and radiation. In our setup, we are modeling the stellar companion with the pulsar’s radiation as a boundary condition coming from one side of the domain. For the radiation, we utilize the gray-radiation solver capability, which uses a mixed-frame formulation of radiation hydrodynamics under the flux-limited diffusion approximation. The nature of the system is not symmetric since the stellar companion faces the pulsar on one side, therefore we have a 3-d setup in addition to a 2-d axisymmetry model. We will present the work in progress, current results and future effort.
The work at Stony Brook was supported by DOE/Office of Nuclear Physics grant DE-FG02-87ER40317
Primary author
Ms
Maria Barrios Sazo
(Stony Brook University)
Co-authors
Prof.
Michael Zingale
(Stony Brook University)
Dr
Weiqun Zhang
(Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)