Universality and Nonuniversality in Distributed Nuclear Burning in Homogeneous Isotropic Turbulence.

Nuclear burning plays a key role in a wide range of astrophysical stellar transients, including thermonuclear, pair instability, and core collapse supernovae, as well as kilonovae and collapsars. Turbulence is now understood to also play a key role in these astrophysical transients. Here, we demonstrate that turbulent nuclear burning may lead to large enhancements above the uniform background burning rate, since turbulent dissipation gives rise to temperature fluctuations, and in general the nuclear burning rates are highly sensitive to temperature.