[Mesa-users] Terminated evolution of F type star

[Diogo Capelo]

Hello Kira, and welcome to using MESA.

Evolving a 1.5 M_Sun star from the pre-Main Sequence all the way to a 
White Dwarf means going through some rather challenging evolutionary 
steps, which can be dominated by very different physical phenomena. 
These different scenarios often benefit from different approaches, and 
so, trying to evolve a star through the Main Sequence using the same 
controls as through the Helium flash is not optimal (and will, in fact, 
often fail). MESA can and will get your star through these stages, but 
in most cases, changing your inlist to handle the difficulties of each 
stage of evolution separately will result in a faster, more consistent 
model.

I suggest you take a look at the test_suite case "1M_pre_ms_to_wd", 
which evolves a 1M_Sun star from the pre-Main Sequence (MS) to White 
Dwarf (WD). On it, ou will be able to identify several (six!) inlists:

inlist_start
inlist_to_end_core_h_burn
inlist_to_start_he_core_flash
inlist_to_end_core_he_burn
inlist_to_end_agb
inlist_to_wd

Each of these inlists contains small changes that make a big difference 
when running a model through some specifically challenging steps like 
the RGB ascent, the Helium flash, or the AGB. My suggestion is that you 
read these inlists, and then seek out the controls in the documentation, 
and the Physics in the MESA papers. I learned a lot of stellar physics 
by trying to understand why a specific control is on an inlist.

Examining the 'rn' file will also reveal some interesting built-in MESA 
functions that allow you to run several inlists without having to stop 
and restart by hand each time.

Hope this helps!

-- 

Diogo
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