Dying stars' graphics

[Kiera120]

Forgive the dumb questions, I'm still trying to figure out everything.

First, I repeated a simulation of a star going supernova until I got the perfect video shot.  Usually the resulting nebula looked exactly the same as last time, but every now and then the colors were totally different.  Same star and most of the time the same simulation saved about half a million years before the big event.  Is there a randomness to the program that would give an uncommon color change?  Or did my computer simply do something freaky?

Second, now I'm trying for a plain old nova, and failing spectacularly.  Two different stars, one being our sun.  The simulation runs along and then name change, the star is renamed "star nova remnant".  Is there no graphic for a star puffing up?  Am I running the simulation too fast to see it?  I'm usually running the simulation at about 50k to 100k years per second when that happens.

[Jar]

Very fair questions! 

1 - While the nebula colors are based on optical images of supernovae, they are not yet connected to what type of nova it is or the type of star that was involved. So if they change, that is normal.

2 - It sounds like it may be as you guessed, that the sim is running too fast to see it. Though I just tested and while I certainly see the star (the Sun in this case) grow in radius, even at very high time steps, I cannot see the nebula at that speed. That said, there are a number of bugs with stellar evolution right now that we have on hold, as we have a new stellar evolution model that we are going to implement. (This will still come with some design challenges, though, as the matter of actually viewing stellar evolution can be very tricky, when some changes take place over a vast period of time, and then suddenly in a fraction of that time the star collapses, for example.)

[Kiera120]

Thanks for the reply.

I managed to get the timing right to have a time of 1 week per second at the end of our sun's life, and there was no puffing up to a red giant, just a sudden and subtle lighting change and the label changing to "nova remnant".

I'm looking forward to the new model.