NASA uses a climate simulation supercomputer to better understand black hole jets

Essentially, “they regulate the gas in the center of the galaxy and affect things like the star-formation rate and how the gas mixes with the surrounding galactic environment,” study lead Ryan Tanner, a postdoc in NASA Goddard’s X-ray Astrophysics Laboratory, explained in a press release.

Simulating space jets

The scientists, who published their findings in a paper in The Astronomical Journal, focused on simulating low-luminosity jets, as these are harder to detect in real-world astronomical observations. “For our simulations, we focused on less-studied, low-luminosity jets and how they determine the evolution of their host galaxies,” Tanner explained. “High-luminosity jets are easier to find because they create massive structures that can be seen in radio observations.”

For their NASA supercomputer-powered simulation, the researchers used the total mass of a hypothetical galaxy about the size of the Milky Way as a starting point. They also used spiral galaxies, including NGC 1386, NGC 3079, and NGC 4945, as a reference for gas distribution and other properties.

“Being able to use NASA supercomputing resources allowed us to explore a much larger parameter space than if we had to use more modest resources,” Tanner explained. “This led to uncovering important relationships that we could not discover with a more limited scope.”

Out of the 100 simulations the team ran, they selected 19 for publication, totaling 800,000 core hours of processing time on the NCCS Discover supercomputer. A video showing the simulations in motion can be viewed below.

NASA’s supercomputer findings

Thanks to their simulations, the team found that low-luminosity jets interact with their host galaxies a lot more than their high-luminosity counterparts. They also discovered that low-luminosity jets affect and are affected by the interstellar medium within their galaxy, meaning they will exist in a wider variety of shapes than high-luminosity jets.

On its website, NASA says the more than 127,232-core Discover supercomputer is “an assembly of multiple Linux scalable units built upon commodity components capable of nearly 8.1 petaflops, or 8,100 trillion floating-point operations per second.”

The impressive machine is predominantly used for short and long-term climate predictions. In this case, however, it was utilized to simulate the extreme conditions present in regions of space millions of light-years away from our pale blue dot.