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Published July 2019 | Accepted Version + Published
Journal Article Open

Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (MESA): Pulsating Variable Stars, Rotation, Convective Boundaries, and Energy Conservation

Abstract

We update the capabilities of the open-knowledge software instrument Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (MESA). RSP is a new functionality in MESAstar that models the nonlinear radial stellar pulsations that characterize RR Lyrae, Cepheids, and other classes of variable stars. We significantly enhance numerical energy conservation capabilities, including during mass changes. For example, this enables calculations through the He flash that conserve energy to better than 0.001%. To improve the modeling of rotating stars in MESA, we introduce a new approach to modifying the pressure and temperature equations of stellar structure, as well as a formulation of the projection effects of gravity darkening. A new scheme for tracking convective boundaries yields reliable values of the convective core mass and allows the natural emergence of adiabatic semiconvection regions during both core hydrogen- and helium-burning phases. We quantify the parallel performance of MESA on current-generation multicore architectures and demonstrate improvements in the computational efficiency of radiative levitation. We report updates to the equation of state and nuclear reaction physics modules. We briefly discuss the current treatment of fallback in core-collapse supernova models and the thermodynamic evolution of supernova explosions. We close by discussing the new MESA Testhub software infrastructure to enhance source code development.

Additional Information

© 2019 The American Astronomical Society. Received 2019 March 4; revised 2019 May 15; accepted 2019 May 15; published 2019 July 8. We thank Warrick Ball and Evan Bauer for their sustained engagment with the MESA project. Both Richa Kundu and Susmita Das graciously shared their variable star calculations. It is a pleasure to thank Conny Aerts, Sean Couch, Franck Delahaye, Luc Dessart, Ebraheem Farag, Carl Fields, Chris Fontes, Chris Fryer, Jim Fuller, Sanjib Gupta, Joyce Guzik, Falk Herwig, Thomas Janka, Sam Jones, Max Katz, John Lattanzio, Abhijit Majumder, Wendell Misch, Joey Mombarg, Viktoriya Morozova, Sterl Phinney, Eliot Quataert, Rene Reifarth, Toshio Suzuki, Katie Mussack Tamashiro, Dean Townsley, Todd Thompson, Suzannah Wood, and Mike Zingale for discussions. We also thank the participants of the 2018 MESA Summer School for their willingness to experiment with new capabilities. The improvements discussed in Section 5 were in large part discussed during RHDT and AT stays at the Munger residence. The MESA project is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under the Software Infrastructure for Sustained Innovation program grants (ACI-1663684, ACI-1663688, ACI-1663696). This research benefited from interactions that were funded in part by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation through grant GBMF5076 and was also supported at UCSB by the NSF under grant 17-48958. This research was also supported at ASU by the NSF under grant PHY-1430152 for the Physics Frontier Center "Joint Institute for Nuclear Astrophysics—Center for the Evolution of the Elements" (JINA-CEE). Support for this work was provided by NASA through Hubble Fellowship grant No. HST-HF2-51382.001-A awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., for NASA, under contract NAS5-26555. The Center for Computational Astrophysics at the Flatiron Institute is supported by the Simons Foundation. P.M. acknowledges support from NSF grant AST-1517753 and the Senior Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) program in Gravity and Extreme Universe, both granted to Vassiliki Kalogera at Northwestern University. S.M.K thanks the Indo-US Science and Technology Forum for financial support. A.T. is a Research Associate at the Belgian Scientific Research Fund (F.R.S-FNRS). R.F is supported by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) through a top module 2 grant with project No. 614.001.501 (PI de Mink). R.S. acknowledges support from the IdP II 2015 0002 64 grant of the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education and from SONATA BIS grant, 2018/30/E/ST9/00598, from the National Science Center, Poland. R.H.D.T. acknowledges support from the NSF under grant AST-1716436. M.Z. was supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation through grant No. 2017-274. J.A.G. is supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under grant No. 1650114. A.S.J. acknowledges support from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation under grant GBMF7392. This work was in part carried out on the Dutch national e-infrastructure with the support of SURF Cooperative. This paper is based on work supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) under contract No. NNG16PJ26C issued through the WFIRST Science Investigation Teams Program. This research made extensive use of the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS). Software: gnuplot (Williams & Kelley 2015), ipython/jupyter (Pérez & Granger 2007; Kluyver et al. 2016), matplotlib (Hunter 2007), NumPy (van der Walt et al. 2011), and Python from http://www.python.org.

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Published - Paxton_2019_ApJS_243_10.pdf

Accepted Version - 1903.01426.pdf

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Additional details

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August 19, 2023
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October 20, 2023