SAS Lecture: Supernovae

A supernova occurs when a star that is too massive to die quietly explodes at the end of its life. The energy released in this explosion is so large that the star becomes more than a hundred billion times as bright as the Sun for a period of six months to a year.
The talk Professor Sam Falle describes these events and uses the mathematical theory of explosions to illuminate the relationship between supernovae and explosions on Earth, particularly nuclear explosions.

Talks in Person

This walk will be held at the Washington Wetlands Centre (Discovery Room).

The talk will also be broadcast via MS Teams (providing no technical and/or WIFI difficulties)

Please show you support to our Speaker and the Society in person if you can be there on the lecture night.

Hopefully we see you all at the Wetlands Centre (Discovery Room) , Raffle & Refreshments as usual.

When Where Who

• Date:  Sunday 19th October 2025,
• Time: From 7 pm.
• Speaker: Professor Sam Falle, Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences/ School of Mathematics, Leeds University. 
• Venue:     At the Washington Wetlands Centre (Discovery Room) and Via Teams (Video Streaming Link).

Our speaker

Professor Sam Falle, Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences/ School of Mathematics, Leeds University. 

Most of Prof. Sam Falle’s  career has been spent working on hyperbolic systems of conservation laws, which are the equations that model the physics of compressible flow, non-linear elasticity, shallow water and many other phenomena. 

Research Interests

Since these equations are very difficult to solve analytically, much of my work has involved the development of numerical methods, in particular the development of an extremely general code which uses a hierarchical adaptive grid and modern upwind methods.

This is able to solve pretty well any system of hyperbolic conservation laws very efficiently since the adaptive grid is able to resolve sharp features such as shocks, shear layers and reaction zones. The code is also able to multi-fluids and multi-phase flow. It has been implemented on distributed memory parallel machines using MPI.

The generality of the code is demonstrated by the areas to which it has been applied, such as:

• Astrophysical gas dynamics and magneto-gas dynamics (e.g. star formation, detonation waves in supernovae).
• Detonation waves in industrial explosives.
• Flames and detonation to deflagration transition in combustible mixtures.
• Multi-phase flow of carbon dioxide. Microbial chemotaxis in groundwater.

Profile:

• BA in Natural Sciences, University of Cambridge, 1969
• MSc in Astrophysics, University of Sussex, 1970
• DPhil In Astrophysics, University of Sussex, 1973, Thesis Title “The Dynamical Effects of Stellar Winds on the Interstellar Medium”
• Research Assistant, Department of Astronmy, University of Manchester, September 1973 to August 1976.
• Royal Society European Exchange Fellow, Max Planck, Institute for Physics and Astrophysics, Munich, September 1976 to March 1978.
• Lecturer, Department of Applied Mathematics, University of Leeds, April 1978 to July 1988.
• Reader, Department of Applied Mathematics, University of Leeds, August 1988 to July 1995.
• Professor, Department 

Talks at the Wetlands and via Teams

Talks at Wetlands Centre

The SAS is planning to run this  lecture from the our base of operations Washington Wetlands Centre (in the usual Discovery Room) and via Teams (Access details TBC).

Suitable hand sanitisers will be located in the room and at the our observatory.