The Simmering Sun (Illustration)

One frame of a ten-minute video rendered by Michael Wiltberger, a senior at Clarkson University, who participated in the Cornell Theory Center's Supercomputing Program for Undergraduate Research this past summer, under the supervision of Steven Lantz, a member of the center's Computational Science and Engineering Research Group. It shows a model of a fluid represented by very few Fourier modes. The right side of the plot shows amplitudes of two of the nine modes in this model of convection with magnetic fields. The left side represents streamlines of the flow for the corresponding amplitudes.