Hydrodynamical simulations of detonations in superbursts Original Research Article

A new hydrodynamical algorithm to study astrophysical detonations is presented. A prime motivation of this development is the description of a carbon detonation in conditions relevant to superbursts, which are thought to result from the propagation of a detonation front around the surface of a neutron star in the carbon layer underlying the atmosphere. The algorithm we have developed is a finite-volume method inspired by the original MUSCL scheme of van Leer (1979). The one-dimensional calculations we have performed demonstrate that the carbon detonation at the surface of a neutron star is a multiscale phenomenon. The length scale of liberation of energy is 106 times smaller than the total reaction length. We show that a multi-resolution approach can be used to solve all the reaction lengths. For mixed H/He accreting systems, we have introduced a new reduced network to study the impact of the photodisintegration of the heavy elements on the detonation.