PhD student Adelle Goodwin has been working hard trying to reconcile results of our 1-D time-dependent thermonuclear burst code Kepler with those of a much simpler (and much faster) code while trying to model the bursts from a millisecond pulsar, SAX 1808.4—3658. Continuing failure of this effort led to suspicion about the formula for the nuclear energy yield, and some careful experiments with Kepler revealed that the widely-used approximation for the energy generation adopted for the simpler code substantially overestimated the contribution lost as neutrinos. Adelle's paper on the study has now been published by ApJ. Adelle's work was also highlighted in the 2018 December edition of the JINA-CEE Newsletter.

Read the paper (ApJ 870, 64, 2019)

Labels: 2018, /postgrads