[mesa-users] MESA for giant planet initial thermal evolution

[Bill Paxton]

On Apr 27, 2014, at 11:09 PM, Sergei Nayakshin wrote:

> Hi Ana-Maria,
> 
> I'm new to MESA myself, but I also come in from the planet formation side, and I imagine that the problems you have are physical rather than numerical. If I understand it correctly you're trying to simulate the pre-collapse stage of planet formation, i.e., a planet so fluffy and cool that it is dominated by molecular H. The gas density at the Bondi radius would be of the order of the accretion disc density, which is probably 10^-10 g/cm^3, and temperature T ~ 100 K, although these numbers could vary with the separation of the planet from the star.
> 
> Perhaps MESA creators could comment on this further as I am out of my depth on how MESA would deal with this parameter space.

Hi Sergei,

Attached are plots show ingthe current mesa coverage for opacities and eos.   as you can see we blend together pieces from various sources to cover the large parameter space.   The numbers you mention are definitely pushing the limits.  I'd again suggest testing how far you can get with the current mesa by doing stellar engineering to re-inflate the model -- that will progressively take you farther into the lowT-low Rho region so you can see how far you get.   

And of course keep in mind that given interest in planet formation, the mesa input physics can be extended as necessary.

to get the Freeman opacities set kappa_lowT_prefix = 'lowT_Freedman11' in the &star_job inlist.
the eos automatically includes SCVH.

-Bill



opacities
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eos
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