[Mesa-users] inlist for ~2Ms star terminating on the TP-AGB, mesa v10398

[Francis Timmes]

great question as a potential discussion could take on 
at least two flavors, one astrophysical and one meta.

astro first. with no mass loss by default, how many thermal pulses 
will there be? each thermal pulse adds more mass to the hot co white dwarf
and is more energetic than its predecessor pulse. will there be enough 
thermal pulses to produce a near chandra mass 1.4 msun white dwarf, or does 
something else intervene to end up producing a less massive limiting mass?

meta second. mesa is, as someone once phrased it to me, "designed to run".
the minimalist 2 command inlist below demonstrates this design feature nicely.
in many cases this feature is a huge positive as it allows rapid initial 
exploration without fussing or tons of compute resources. the potential danger 
of a "designed to run" feature is perhaps best phrased as “is this model publishable?”.

let’s see what responses this reply generates ;)

fxt






> On Apr 24, 2018, at 3:17 AM, Warrick Ball via Mesa-users <mesa-users at lists.mesastar.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I realise this is basically resolved but the question piqued my curiosity. In my relatively-limited experience of modelling post-RGB stars, I thought low-mass MESA models usually started going through the TP-AGB without any special input.  So I spun up a default run in r10398 with the following almost trivial `inlist_project`:
> 
> 
> &star_job
>    create_pre_main_sequence_model = .true.
> / !end of star_job namelist
> 
> 
> &controls
>    initial_mass = 1.5 ! in Msun units
> / ! end of controls namelist
> 
> 
> Sure, it's slow, but I left it running overnight and after 18 hours on 2 cores I count 34 thermal pulses.
> 
> Cheers,
> Warrick
> 
> 
> ------------
> Warrick Ball
> Postdoc, School of Physics and Astronomy
> University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT
> wball at bison.ph.bham.ac.uk
> +44 (0)121 414 4552
> 
> On Mon, 23 Apr 2018, mesa-users at lists.mesastar.org wrote:
> 
>> Hi all,
>> Would anyone be able to point me to an inlist which generates a TP-AGB star (terminating during the thermal pulsations) that runs with MESA v 10398? I had success with the attached inlist ('inlist_tashibu_2017a') used by Tashibu et al (2017) in mesa version 8118, but it produces a number of parameter name and convergence issues in v10398. I have guessed at the appropriate changes when MESA points out a naming conflict, but have thus far failed to produce a converged model. One of my attempted adjusted inlists is attached as 'inlist_tashibu_editing_attempt'
>> 
>> At the moment, I am not so interested in diagnosing why Tashibu's exact physical prescription no longer works, I would just like to be able to run a generic TP-AGB model *without* using one of MESA's pre-built prems models to start.
>> 
>> Any insight is greatly appreciated,
>> 
>> 
>> Meridith Joyce
>> Ph.D. Candidate, Wilder Lab
>> Department of Physics and Astronomy
>> Dartmouth College
>> 
> _______________________________________________
> mesa-users at lists.mesastar.org
> https://lists.mesastar.org/mailman/listinfo/mesa-users
>