[Mesa-users] Difficulty Reproducing Goodwin & Woods (2020) Results in MESA

[Sanskar]

Hi MESA-users,

I am trying to reproduce some of the results from Goodwin & Woods (2020) using MESA, but I am encountering difficulties in evolving the system beyond approximately 10 Gyr.

At late evolutionary stages, the donor star becomes highly degenerate, and the solver continuously reduces the timestep to extremely small values. As a result, the evolution effectively stagnates, with the physical parameters changing negligibly, so the subsequent evolution no longer appears to make meaningful progress.

The original paper used MESA version r9575, whereas I am using MESA version r25.12.1. I suspect that differences between the MESA versions or my implementation of the evaporation prescription may be contributing to the issue.

For the donor evaporation prescription, I have used the implementation based on Jia & Li (2015). I am attaching my inlists and run_binary_extras.f90 file for reference, along with the paper link below:

Paper:
https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/495/1/796/5831083

I am very new to MESA, so I would greatly appreciate any suggestions regarding:

timestep controls,

convergence issues in detached/degenerate donor evolution,

or possible differences between modern MESA versions and r9575.

Thank you very much for your time and help.

Best regards,
Sanskar Chauhan

 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.mesastar.org/pipermail/mesa-users/attachments/20260509/246d3456/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: inlist_project
Type: application/octet-stream
Size: 1320 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.mesastar.org/pipermail/mesa-users/attachments/20260509/246d3456/attachment.obj>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.mesastar.org/pipermail/mesa-users/attachments/20260509/246d3456/attachment-0001.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: inlist1
Type: application/octet-stream
Size: 5110 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.mesastar.org/pipermail/mesa-users/attachments/20260509/246d3456/attachment-0001.obj>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.mesastar.org/pipermail/mesa-users/attachments/20260509/246d3456/attachment-0002.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: run_binary_extras.f90
Type: application/octet-stream
Size: 27915 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.mesastar.org/pipermail/mesa-users/attachments/20260509/246d3456/attachment-0002.obj>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.mesastar.org/pipermail/mesa-users/attachments/20260509/246d3456/attachment-0003.htm>