PION: Simulations of Wind-Blown Nebulae

Abstract

We present an overview of PION, an open-source software project for solving radiation-magnetohydrodynamics equations on a nested grid, aimed at modelling asymmetric nebulae around massive stars. A new implementation of hybrid OpenMP/MPI parallel algorithms is briefly introduced, and improved scaling is demonstrated compared with the current release version. Three-dimensional simulations of an expanding nebula around a Wolf-Rayet star are then presented and analysed, similar to previous 2D simulations in the literature. The evolution of the emission measure of the gas and the X-ray surface brightness are calculated as a function of time, and some qualitative comparison with observations is made.

6 pages, 3 figures, conference proceedings, IAUS362: The predictive power of computational astrophysics as discovery tool (D. Bisikalo, T. Hanawa, C. Boily, J. Stone, eds.)