Coalescence milliseconds before completion. The colors show densities.

In the period, 1996-1999, NASA sponsored the Coalescing Binary Neutron Stars project as a part of the Earth and Spaces Sciences Grand Challenges program at Goddard Space Flight Center. (The usual acronym for one neutron star is ``NS'' and ``NSNS'' for binary neutron stars.) The objective, briefly, was a high performance code to solve the Einstein space time equations combined with the Navier Stokes equations of fluid flow and then apply this code to the study of coalesing binary neutron stars.

Here are some links to NASA images featuring NSs:

• The Hubble Space Telescope view of an isolated NS.
• Close up view of an accreting NS.

There were eight members of the Binary Neutron Star team:

• Steve Ashby. Center for Applied Scientific Computing (CASC), Lawrence Livermore National Lab, Livermore, CA. sfashby@llnl.gov

• Ian Foster, Mathematics and Computer Science, Argonne National Lab. Also Department of Computer Science, University of Chicago. itf@mcs.anl.gov

• Jim Lattimer, State University of New York at Stony Brook. Physics. lattimer@sbast4.ess.sunysb.edu

• Paul Saylor, Department of Computer Science UIUC and NCSA. saylor@cs.uiuc.edu

• Ed Seidel, Max Planck-Albert Einstein Institute, Potsdam, Germany and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), Urbana, IL. eseidel@aei-potsdam.mpg.de

• Wai-Mo Suen, Department of Physics, Washington University, St. Louis. wms@wugrav.wustl.edu

• Doug Swesty, Department of Physics and Astronomy, SUNY at Stony Brook dswesty@astro.sunysb.edu

  With the Viz help of David Bock and John Shalf of NCSA plus the scientific help of Alan Calder and Ed Wang, Doug has recently completed some movies of a merger. These may take several minutes to load, depending.

  • Text, colorful shots and link to a movie

  • More shots plus technical comments from David Bock on Viz.

• Cliff Will, Department of Physics, Washington University, St. Louis, MO. cmw@wuphys.wustl.edu