Collaborative Research: SI2-SSI: Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics

Arizona State University, Scottsdale AZ

Investigators

Abstract

Stars are the most commonly observed celestial objects, and remain at the forefront of astronomical research. The goal of this project is to sustain the MESA software framework as a key piece of software infrastructure for the astronomy community while building new innovative scientific capabilities and educational networks. MESA (Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics) is a software instrument that solves the equations governing the evolution of stars. The MESA project 1) has attracted over 900 registered users world-wide; 2) has over 10,000 downloads of the source code; 3) has received over 12,000 archived and searchable posts about community discussions of MESA; 4) has been cited about 1000 times and has a current citation rate of about 300/year; 5) papers that cite MESA have themselves generated over 10,000 citations; 6) provides a Software Development Kit to build MESA across a variety of platforms; 7) delivers an annual Summer School program that now has over 150 graduates; 8) hosts a web-portal for the astronomy community to share knowledge and tools; 9) offers a prototype of a cloud resource for education, MESA-Web. These metrics provide evidence that MESA is becoming standard software for understanding evolving stars. This project supports the MESA software framework and its user community. MESA provides solvers for one-dimensional fully coupled structures and composition equations governing stellar evolution. It is based on an implicit finite volume scheme with adaptive mesh refinement and sophisticated time-step controls; state-of-the-art modules provide equation of state, opacity, nuclear reaction rates, element diffu- sion, boundary conditions, and changes to the mass of the star. MESA is an open source library that employs contemporary numerical approaches, supports shared memory parallelism based on OpenMP, and is designed with present and future multi-core and multi-thread architectures in mind. MESA combines composable, interoperable, robust, efficient, thread-safe numerical and physics modules for provenance-capable simulations of a wide range of stellar evolution scenarios ranging from giant planets to low mass single stars to massive star binaries. MESA?s domain of applicability continues to grow, with recent extensions enabling users to model oscillations, rota- tion, binary stars, and explosions. Recent technical innovations allow for user plugins and provide bit-for-bit consistent results across all supported platforms. The products of the MESA project has driven and will continue to drive significant innovation in the stellar, gravitational wave, nuclear, exoplanet, galactic, and cosmological communities.