[mesa-users] Problem with evolving pure helium stars

[Ylva Götberg]

Hello everyone,

I am trying to evolve single stars made of helium and with solar metallicity (no hydrogen at all). They don’t find a solution after 50 000 models (varcontrol), so I guess I wrote something wrong. In the inlist_project I have put the following lines to specify it is a helium star:

  ! Initial metallicity
    initial_z = 0.0134

  ! Helium content
    initial_y = 0.9866

and nothing else. The pre-main sequence goes well, but when the star should start burning it doesn’t succeed. I have tried masses of 0.5 MSun and 5.5 MSun.

Is there anyone who knows what is happening and how I can solve this? 

Cheers,
Ylva (PhD in Amsterdam)