Austin TX (SPX) Oct 25, 2021 In the heavens above, it's raining dirt. Every second, millions of...
Scientists are using supercomputers to help understand how tiny meteors, invisible to the naked eye, liberate electrons that can be detected by radar and can characterize the speed, direction and rate of meteor deceleration with high precision, allowing its origin to be determined.
They allow scientists to be able to diagnose what's in the air using pulsed laser remote sensing lidar, which bounces off meteor dust to reveal the temperature, density, and the winds of the upper atmosphere.
In it, lead author Glenn Sugar of Johns Hopkins University developed computer simulations to model the physics of what happens when a meteor hits the atmosphere.
The particle-in-cell, finite-difference time-domain simulations were used to generate density distributions of the plasma generated by meteor atoms as their electrons are stripped off in collisions with air molecules.
"Now we're really able to use the power of Stampede2 - these giant supercomputers - to evaluate meteor ablation in incredible detail," said Oppenheim.
Oppenheim referred to a 2020 study led by Boston University undergraduate Gabrielle Guttormsen that simulates tiny meteor ablation to see how fast it heats up and how much material bubbles away.
Meteor ablation physics is very hard to do with pen and paper calculations, because meteors are incredibly inhomogeneous, said Oppenheim.
Oppenheim's team models ablation all the way from picoseconds, which is the time scale of the meteor disintegrating and the atoms interacting when the air molecules slam into them.
Oppenheim outlined three different types of simulations he's conducting to attack the meteor ablation problem.
Said Oppenheim: "Supercomputers give scientists the power to investigate in detail the real physical processes, not simplified toy models. They're ultimately a tool for numerically testing ideas and coming to a better understanding of the nature of meteor physics and everything in the universe."