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, MESAstar. Improvements in MESAstar'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 MESAstar. 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…

• NS
  National Science Foundation

  Awards: 0908873, PHY 11-25915, 0909107, 08-22648, PHY 08-22648, 0904607, 0908688
• NA
  National Aeronautics and Space Administration

  Awards: NNX12AC96G, NNX12AC72G, NNX09AF98G, NAI5-0018, NNX11AD31G
• UO
  University of California, San Diego
• HP
  High Performance Research Computing, Texas A and M University
• KI
  Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara