Speaker
Description
Astrophysical shocks play an important role a variety of processes such as supernovae, novae, and gamma-ray bursts. A shock-capturing radiation hydrodynamics scheme based on the Euler equations is developed for simulating the dynamics of gas in astrophysical systems. The scheme's validity is demonstrated by various test cases and comparison to analytically derived solutions. Since recent detections of gamma-rays from novae have implied the involvement of shocks in their thermal and non-thermal emission, they are ideal candidates for testing the model. The model is thus applied to the example of the recent nova RS Oph in 2021, the dynamics of the system is discussed and the simulated optical light curves are compared to observations. It is found that values of ejecta mass and velocity well within the expected parameter space for novae are able to account for the optical emission from the system.
