[Mesa-users] Creating a Highly Irradiated Super-Earth

[Brian Jackson]

> excellent.  i missed that.   perhaps as a workaround you might try making the core larger so that the innermost temperature and density would be lower.   that might get around the eos problems you are having.

OK, helpful advice. Thanks.

> it would be nice to know if the Chen & Rogers scheme still works in the current mesa.   too bad we don’t have a test case that corresponds to their work - that would be wonderful as a way to make sure the necessary parts of the code are continuing to work as expected.

As far as I can tell, their scheme does NOT work anymore. I downloaded
their inlists and models and followed the instructions from the
MESA2017 workshop, but MESA would not complete the desired calculation.

I can get things to work for a slightly different mass/core model than
I've shared here by: (1) inserting a core into a gas giant model from
the original Arras test suite, (2) irradiating the gas giant with a
fraction of my desired final flux, (3) paring down the mass to a
super-Earth, (4) irradiating again with a little more flux, followed
by a lengthy evolution (1 Gyr) under that flux, (5) cranking up to
the desired final flux, followed by more evolution, and then finally
(6) setting a large central entropy by increasing the core luminosity
(using relax_L_center).

I was exploring evolution for the planet I've shared here (20 Earth
mass planet with F = 1000 FEarth and fenv = 10% or 20%) because I
wanted to compare my results to Lopez & Fortney (2014) to make sure I
was doing things right.

I will share my codes, inlists, and models as the corresponding paper
comes together. The users' list help so far has been invaluable.

Thanks,
Brian