MESA intro

What is MESA?
Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics, an open-source 1D stellar evolution code.
Why MESA?

• Comprehensive: simulate the entire life cycle of stars, from their formation to their death, including processes such as nuclear burning, convection, rotation, and mass loss.
• Up-to-date: E.g., EoS table, opacity table.
• Flexible: modified to adapt to binary star/ planetary interior.
• Large community: MESA summer school 2023 @Hungary
• Extensive test.

homepage
Get prepared

• Install MESA SDK, a collection of compilers and run-time libraries needed for MESA

Quick start

©:Andrew Cumming

run MESA: cp -r $MESA_DIR/star/test/ ./your_work_dir cd test/ ./mk ./rn restart from photos: ./re x050

simple set-up

E.g., inlist_project

Important parameters:

• initial mass: star mass
• initial z: star metallicity
• xcentral lower limit species = 'he4'
  xcentral lower limit = '1d-3':
  stop when the center mass fration of He drops below 1.e-3.
• pgstar flag = .true.
  Real-time output plot window. This is described in other file: inlist_pgstar

Want to learn how to use pgstar? nice tutorial video
Now let's show some magic.

high mass star example

This is a test case from MESA code. You can find more test cases in $Your_MESA_Dir/star/test_suite/.
I have modified inlist_common, inlist_pgstar and inlist_mass_Z_wind_rotation.