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Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (MESA): Planets, Oscillations, Rotation, and Massive Stars

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abstract

We substantially update the capabilities of the open source software package Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (MESA), and its one-dimensional stellar evolution module, MESA Star. Improvements in MESA Star's ability to model the evolution of giant planets now extends its applicability down to masses as low as one-tenth that of Jupiter. The dramatic improvement in asteroseismology enabled by the space-based Kepler and CoRoT missions motivates our full coupling of the ADIPLS adiabatic pulsation code with MESA Star. This also motivates a numerical recasting of the Ledoux criterion that is more easily implemented when many nuclei are present at non-negligible abundances. This impacts the way in which MESA Star calculates semi-convective and thermohaline mixing. We exhibit the evolution of 3-8 Msun stars through the end of core He burning, the onset of He thermal pulses, and arrival on the white dwarf cooling sequence. We implement diffusion of angular momentum and chemical abundances that enable calculations of rotating-star models, which we compare thoroughly with earlier work. We introduce a new treatment of radiation-dominated envelopes that allows the uninterrupted evolution of massive stars to core collapse. This enables the generation of new sets of supernovae, long gamma-ray burst, and pair-instability progenitor models. We substantially modify the way in which MESA Star solves the fully coupled stellar structure and composition equations, and we show how this has improved MESA's performance scaling on multi-core processors. Updates to the modules for equation of state, opacity, nuclear reaction rates, and atmospheric boundary conditions are also provided. We describe the MESA Software Development Kit (SDK) that packages all the required components needed to form a unified and maintained build environment for MESA. [Abridged]

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  • abstract We substantially update the capabilities of the open source software package Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (MESA), and its one-dimensional stellar evolution module, MESA Star. Improvements in MESA Star's ability to model the evolution of giant planets now extends its applicability down to masses as low as one-tenth that of Jupiter. The dramatic improvement in asteroseismology enabled by the space-based Kepler and CoRoT missions motivates our full coupling of the ADIPLS adiabatic pulsation code with MESA Star. This also motivates a numerical recasting of the Ledoux criterion t
  • dataset (2005), [11] Soubiran & Girard (2005), [12] Valenti & Fischer (2005), [13] Reddy et al. (2006), [14] Takeda et al. (2007), [15] Ram'ırez et al. (2007), [16] Sousa et al. (2008), [17] Holmberg et al. (2009), [18] Mena et al. (2010), [19] Ghezzi et al. (2010), [20] Gonzalez et al. (2010), [21] Prugniel et al. (2011), [22] Adibekyan et al. (2012), [23] Ram 'ırez et al. (2012), [24] Maldonado et al. (2012), [25] Da Silva et al. (2012), [26] Ram 'ırez et al. (2013), [27] Tsantaki et al. (2013), [28]
  • background Jaeckel,Probing Minicharged Particles with Tests of Coulomb's Law,Phys. Rev. Lett.103(2009) 080402 [0904.1547]. [81] J. Jaeckel and A. Ringwald,The Low-Energy Frontier of Particle Physics,Ann. Rev. Nucl. Part. Sci.60 (2010) 405 [1002.0329]. [82] M. D. Diamond and P. Schuster,Searching for Light Dark Matter with the SLAC Millicharge Experiment, Phys. Rev. Lett.111(2013) 221803 [1307.6861]. [83] H. Vogel and J. Redondo,Dark Radiation constraints on minicharged particles in models with a hidden pho
  • background companion star,E heat, which is given by Eheat =p·E kin,ej · ˜Ωeff,(1) withp=0.08 an efficiency factor (Hirai et al. 2018). Here, ˜Ωeff is the fractional solid angle subtended by the companion as seen from the exploding progenitor, which is a function of the com- panion's radiusR2 and its separationa: ˜Ωeff= Ω(R,a) 4π = 1 2 1− s 1−  R2 a 2  .(2) The intersected energyE heat drives the stellar expansion un- til the luminosity matches the local Eddington luminosity in the lay
  • background The brighter the star and/or the lower its effective temperature, the higher the mass-loss rate. We vary the linear scaling parameterη, choosing values of 0.2, 0.4, 0.8, and 1.0. Modern simulations sometimes adopt values ofη <1.0 to account for wind inhomo- geneities ("clumping") and other evidence suggesting the standard "Dutch" prescription withη= 1.0 is too ag- gressive [47, 48]. Note that Renzo et al. [19] showed that the choice of scaling parameterηis generally much more influential than th
  • background (2013), arXiv:1301.0319 [astro-ph.SR]. [48] B. Paxton, P. Marchant, J. Schwab, E. B. Bauer, L. Bild- sten, M. Cantiello, L. Dessart, R. Farmer, H. Hu, N. Langer, R. H. D. Townsend, D. M. Townsley, and F. X. Timmes, Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astro- physics (MESA): Binaries, Pulsations, and Explosions, ApJS220, 15 (2015), arXiv:1506.03146 [astro-ph.SR]. [49] B. Paxton, J. Schwab, E. B. Bauer, L. Bildsten, S. Blinnikov, P. Duffell, R. Farmer, J. A. Goldberg, P. Marchant, E. Sorokina, A. Th

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