U.S. researchers have turned to supercomputers to create a visual model of what happens inside a star spinning rapidly on its axis.
Depicting a star with a mass about the same as our sun but spinning five times faster, the model was created by a team at the University of Texas, Arlington, using the Ranger supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center.
It reveals swirling patterns of turbulence within the plasma of the star's interior, the result of the extreme temperatures existing at its heart.
"Stars like the sun harbor vigorous regions of intense turbulence below their seemingly calm surfaces," the National Science Foundation said in a release describing the animations produced by the simulations.
Such supercomputer models could improve our understanding of the relationship between a star's spin, its age and its massive magnetic fields, the researchers say.
The younger a star is the faster it spins, and that spin in concert with the turbulence within converts kinetic energy into magnetic energy, they explain.
As stars age their spin slows steadily over time as they cool, they say, like a top spinning on a tabletop and gradually slowing down.
"We have found that the relationship between mass, rotation rate and age is now defined well enough by observations that we can obtain the ages of individual stars to within 10 percent," explains researcher Sydney Barnes of the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics in Germany.
Cooler stars, about the size of our sun or smaller, would be the leading candidates in the search for signs of alien life elsewhere in the universe, since such stars last a long time and are the hosts for most of the Earth-like exoplanets found to date, the researchers point out.
