Simulating astrophysical phenomena: challenges and achievements Original Research Article

Simulation is an indispensable and expedient tool for understanding many astrophysical phenomena. Addressing a few challenging computational problems in astrophysics, it is illustrated that simulation can provide the link between observations and theoretical models of astrophysical phenomenon. For obvious reasons, the discussion is restricted to a few specific timely problems, the main bias being the personal involvement of the author into the simulation of these astrophysics problems. In particular, recent work on core collapse supernovae and their gravitational wave signal, on extragalactic jets, and on the modeling of gamma-ray burst sources is presented.