Simulating Milliseconds of Stellar Collapse: A Conversation with Christian Ott

Christian Ott, professor of theoretical astrophysics at Caltech, formulates scenarios for what happens when massive stars collapse. Much about the collapse of massive stars is well understood. But there are crucial hundreds of milliseconds in this process that determine whether a star will collapse into a black hole or into a neutron star, and these milliseconds are still a matter of highly educated and informed speculation. It is these fractions of a second that consume Ott's interest. His scenarios for stellar collapse are stories told with multiple terabytes of computer memory and petaflops of computing power—stories that are plausible, but whose truth is still unknown. One day detections of gravitational waves will help to confirm or contradict the models of stellar collapse that Ott is creating.