Samuel Kenny grabbed the ‘Peoples Choice Award’ at the Visualization Showcase held at the TeraGrid ’09 Conference in Washington, DC.  Sam spent the spring semester (of his freshman year) studying the kinematics of mass transfer in a three-dimensional simulation of mass transfer in the binary star system SS Cygni.  This model was computed on the Ranger supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center for the American Museum of Natural History.  He used the EnSight visualization software to examine the gas flow from the donor star into the accretion disk.  In addition to showing that the flow is well described by the semi-analytic theory of Lubow and Shu, Sam discovered strong cyclonic flow around the Lagrange points L4 and L5.

Download high-resolution version of Sam’s visualization entry.