Other Astrophysics and Astronomy Commons^™

On The Spin Evolution Of Isolated Pulsars, Oliver Quinn Hamil

Doctoral Dissertations

Neutron stars are the remnants of supernova explosions, and harbor the densest matter found in the universe. Because of their extreme physical characteristics, neutron stars make superb laboratories from which to study the nature of matter under conditions of extreme density that are not reproducible on Earth. The understanding of QCD matter is of fundamental importance to modern physics, and neutron stars provide a means of probing into the cold, dense region of the QCD phase diagram.

Isolated pulsars are rotating neutron stars that emit beams of electromagnetic radiation into space which appear like lighthouses to observers on Earth. Observations …

The Effects Of Realistic Nuclear Kinetics, Dimensionality, And Resolution On Detonations In Low-Density Type Ia Supernovae Environments, Thomas L. Papatheodore

Doctoral Dissertations

Type Ia supernovae are most likely thermonuclear explosions of carbon/oxygen white dwarves in binary stellar systems. These events contribute to the chemical and dynamical evolution of their host galaxies and are essential to our understanding of the evolution of our universe through their use as cosmological distance indicators. Nearly all of the currently favored explosion scenarios for these supernovae involve detonations. However, modeling astrophysical detonations can be complicated by numerical effects related to grid resolution. In addition, the fidelity of the reaction network chosen to evolve the nuclear burning can alter the time and length scales over which the burning …

Detection Of Baryonic Acoustic Oscillations In The Matter Power Spectrum, Spencer Everett, Ian Johnson, Jon Murphy, Mary Tarpley

DePaul Discoveries

Using the spectra of 22,923 high-redshift quasars from the Baryon Oscillation Spectrosocpic Survey (BOSS) subset of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), the authors detect evidence of the primordial baryonic acoustic oscillations (BAOs) in the matter power spectrum. The detection further endorses the currently accepted Lambda-CDM model of cosmology based upon the existence of dark energy (Lambda) and cold dark matter (CDM). Additionally, the use of the continuous wavelet transform to calculate the power spectrum has many advantages over traditional Fourier methods and independently corroborates previous detections.