Matteo Cantiello

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

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 stars 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 M ? 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 the scaling of MESAs calculational speed 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 that packages all the required components needed to form a unified, maintained, and well-validated build environment for MESA. We also highlight a few tools developed by the community for rapid visualization of MESA star results.

Rotating Massive Main-Sequence Stars I: Grids of Evolutionary Models and Isochrones

We present a dense grid of evolutionary tracks and isochrones of rotating massive main-sequence stars. We provide three grids with different initial compositions tailored to compare with early OB stars in the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds and in the Galaxy. Each grid covers masses ranging from 5 to 60 M and initial rotation rates between 0 and about 600 km s−1. To calibrate our models we used the results of the VLT-FLAMES Survey of Massive Stars. We determine the amount of convective overshooting by using the observed drop in rotation rates for stars with surface gravities logg <3.2 to determine the width of the main sequence. We calibrate the efficiency of rotationally induced mixing using the nitrogen abundance determinations for B stars in the Large Magellanic cloud. We describe and provide evolutionary tracks and the evolution of the central and surface abundances. In particular, we discuss the occurrence of quasi-chemically homogeneous evolution, i.e. the severe effects of efficient mixing of the stellar interior found for the most massive fast rotators. We provide a detailed set of isochrones for rotating stars. Rotation as an initial parameter leads to a degeneracy between the age and the mass of massive main sequence stars if determined from its observed location in the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. We show that the consideration of surface abundances can resolve this degeneracy.

MESA ISOCHRONES AND STELLAR TRACKS (MIST). I. SOLAR-SCALED MODELS

This is the first of a series of papers presenting the Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (MESA) Isochrones and Stellar Tracks (MIST) project, a new comprehensive set of stellar evolutionary tracks and isochrones computed using MESA, a state-of-the-art open-source 1D stellar evolution package. In this work, we present models with solar-scaled abundance ratios covering a wide range of ages (

Rotating massive main-sequence stars: II. Simulating a population of LMC early B-type stars as a test of rotational mixing

5 \leq \rm \log(Age)\;[yr] \leq 10.3

EVOLUTION OF MASSIVE STARS WITH PULSATION-DRIVEN SUPERWINDS DURING THE RED SUPERGIANT PHASE

), masses (

Magnetic spots on hot massive stars

0.1 \leq M/M_{\odot} \leq 300

Thermohaline mixing in evolved low-mass stars

), and metallicities (

ANGULAR MOMENTUM TRANSPORT VIA INTERNAL GRAVITY WAVES IN EVOLVING STARS

-2.0 \leq \rm [Z/H] \leq 0.5

Late time afterglow observations reveal a collimated relativistic jet in the ejecta of the binary neutron star merger GW170817

). The models are self-consistently and continuously evolved from the pre-main sequence to the end of hydrogen burning, the white dwarf cooling sequence, or the end of carbon burning, depending on the initial mass. We also provide a grid of models evolved from the pre-main sequence to the end of core helium burning for

The Formation and Gravitational-Wave Detection of Massive Stellar Black-Hole Binaries

-4.0 \leq \rm [Z/H] < -2.0