thornado-hydro: towards discontinuous Galerkin methods for supernova hydrodynamics

Abstract

The toolkit for high-order neutrino-radiation hydrodynamics (thornado) is being developed for simulations of core-collapse supernovae (CCSNe) and related problems. Current capabilities in thornado include solvers for the Euler equations — in non-relativistic and special relativistic limits — and the two-moment model of neutrino transport. The spatial discretization in thornado is based on the discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method, which is receiving increased attention from the computational astrophysics community. In this paper, we provide an overview of the numerical methods for the Euler equations in thornado, and present some encouraging preliminary numerical results from a set of basic tests in one and two spatial dimensions.