Stellar Structure and Evolution

AY550 / AY450

Fall 2019

The MESA papers: Paper 1 and Paper 2 and Paper 3

Lecture Notes

Course notes will be posted here as they become available, generally the morning of the lecture. Note that when posted before lecture, notes will be revised after lecture to reflect what was actually covered.

notes below by date, or in a single document.

2019/8/21 Course overview, observed Stellar properties
2019/8/23 Stellar structure, observables
2019/8/26 Observing stars in our galaxy
2019/8/28 Stellar populations; EOS conventions; Starting MESA install
Here is a walkthrough of installing linux on a USB flash drive.
Also might be useful: an intro to the unix command line and a very basic intro to the vi terminal-based text editor
Also see this (likely a little outdated) guide to setting up MESA on an Amazon EC2 instance.
Also this MESA install guide from a grad student from a previous class may be useful.
2019/8/30 Hydrostatic balance in plane parallel
2019/9/4 Hydrostatics and Global Thermodynamics of Stars
2019/9/6 Energy budget and heat transfer
2019/9/9 heat transport and basic scaling relations
2019/9/11 Polytropes - Eddington Standard model
2019/9/13 Photospheres
2019/9/18 Starting convection
2019/9/25 Convection
2019/9/27 Heat transport by convection
2019/9/-- Star formation, protostar accretion
- Reference for protostars, Feigelson & Montmerle 1999, ARA&A, 37, 363 for convenience: the pdf.
2019/9/30 Protostars: Hayashi, contraction
2019/10/2 Protostar contraction time
2019/10/4 Protostar contraction, IMF
2019/10/7 Nuclear Fusion of Hydrogen
2019/10/9 Nuclear cross sections, S-factor
2019/10/11 Stellar Nuclear Burning
2019/10/14 Pre-MS burning: Deuterium, Lithium
2019/10/16 pp vs. CNO, mass ranges
2019/10/18 CNO and the upper MS
2019/10/21 convective core and spectra
2019/10/23 spectra
2019/10/25 evolution during MS
2019/10/28 S-C limit
2019/10/30 He ignition, Red Giants 1
2019/11/4 Red giant shell burning
2019/11/6 Helium fusion
2019/11/11 Helium core flash, horizontal branch, Asymptotic giant branch
2019/11/13 thin shell; white dwarf masses
- Herwig AGB paper
- Renedo et al (2010), figure 2 shows initial-final mass relation, with comparison theory curves
- Kalirai al (2014), figure 4 shows mass added on AGB with comparison to observations (figure 1)
2019/11/15 MESA projects
2019/11/18 neutrinos, advanced burning
2019/11/18 advanced burning, Fe core

Homework Assignments

Homework assignments are posted on the UA Learn Blackboard website for this course.