Research Activities/Projects

This project uses radial pulsation code to model stellar light curves and radial velocity curves for the ancient, evolved variable stars known as RR Lyrae variables. We intend to run many models, varying stellar parameters of luminosity, mass, metal abundance and various turbulent velocity parameters. Our goal is to produce models that can be used to directly compare photometric light curves from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and from our high-resolution, spectroscopic observations from McDonald Observatory. These models will allow us to predict many parameters including changes in temperature, radius, turbulence, and depth of the partially ionized hydrogen and helium zones.

Computational Methods / Software

We will be using the Radial Stellar Pulsation (RSP) code which is included in the Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (MESA). We will therefore need to install MESA.

To install we will be using the package MESA SDK. The software prerequisites for a Linux-based installation of MESA SDK is

The 'Binutils' development tools (for SDKs prior to 23.7.2)
The 'Make' dependency/compilation tool
The 'Perl' scripting language
The 'X11' windowing library plus development headers
The 'Z' compression library plus development headers
The 'C' shell or derivatives

We will also be using Python to do some post processing of the model outputs.

Principal Investigator

Ronald Wilhelm

Students

Gabriel Ahl

Grants

Publications