[mesa-users] Getting uniform coverage of the upper main-sequence / post main-sequence

[Richard Townsend]

Hi folks —

I’m running a grid of 101 massive-star evolutionary tracks (over the mass range 2.5 < M < 25, logarithmically spaced in M) with an eye to mapping out instability strips. For each M, I use MESA to evolve from the ZAMS through to the point where Teff < 6,600K.

Perhaps naively, I was expecting the tracks to each contain a similar number of steps — and that the (log Teff, log L) values from all steps of all tracks would, in some sense, cover the HR diagram reasonably smoothly.

However, I’m finding this not to be the case — tracks with neighboring masses often contain very different numbers of steps. To illustrate this, I attach here a plot of #stesp vs. mass. 



Can anyone enlighten me as to why the number of steps jumps around so much — and what I might do to obtain more predictable behavior? I’m digging through the log files right now, but I thought I should check whether there is a known solution out there.

cheers,

Rich

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.mesastar.org/pipermail/mesa-users/attachments/20150203/918d97f1/attachment.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: steps-from-zams.png
Type: image/png
Size: 34302 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.mesastar.org/pipermail/mesa-users/attachments/20150203/918d97f1/attachment.png>