[mesa-users] Binary capabilities on MESA

[Pablo Marchant]

Hi! Last August at the MESA summer school we had a small session where we
discussed the binary evolution capabilities of MESA. As far as I can
remember, Bill Paxton said that the current implementation for binaries is
more a "proof of concept" than a robust implementation (not his precise
words but something on that line). In that sense, the current code has
restrictions, as for instance only one star can be an accretor while the
other one is set as the donor in a fixed way at the beggining of the
simulation. Also, tidal torques are not implemented.

Even though I'm not very experienced in FORTRAN, I've been skimming through
the source code trying to understand where these things are done, but not
to much avail. I've also been playing with the binary examples on the test
suite (binary_rlo and binary_rlo_implicit, which have equal initial
conditions but different implementations for mass transfer), but I have no
idea if there's a simple way to output info on the binary system itself.

So, going to the point ... I'm really interested on getting a robust
implementation for binaries on MESA, so mostly I'd like to know more
precisely what are the limitations of the current implementation and if
it's part of the development roadmap to enhance this capability. In any
case, I would not have problems on getting involved on actual development
for this functionality.

Cheers to all!

-- 
Pablo Marchant Campos
M.Sc on Astrophysics, Universidad Católica de Chile
PhD student, Argelander-Institut für Astronomie
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