Schedule Oct 28, 2011
MESA as a Tool for Asteroseismology
Lars Bildsten (KITP Permanent Member)

B. Paxton, L. Bildsten, K. Moore, P. Macias
KITP and Department of Physics
UC-Santa Barbara

MESA employs modern numerical approaches and is written with present and future shared-memory, multi-core, multi-thread and possibly hybrid architectures in mind so that performance always grows. MESA star combines the numerical and physics modules for simulations of a wide range of stellar evolution scenarios ranging from very-low mass to massive stars, including advanced evolutionary phases leading up to explosions. It simultaneously solves the fully coupled structure and composition equations. It uses adaptive mesh refinement and sophisticated timestep controls, and supports shared memory parallelism based on OpenMP. State-of-the-art modules provide equation of state, opacity, nuclear reaction rates, and element diffusion, as well as atmosphere boundary conditions. In this poster, we will show MESA's recent application to asteroseismology, focusing on modeling the solar-like oscillator HD49385, a G0 subgiant that was extensively observed by COROT (Deheuvels et al. 2010) and previously modeled by Deheuvels and Michel (2011).

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