Dartmouth Events

Abstract:  My research highlights inadequacies in modern theoretical stellar evolution, particularly regarding uncertainties in the physical assumptions invoked in stellar models and the ineffectiveness of treating 1-D convection as an extension of the solar formalism. I provide a suite of statistical methods, modeling techniques, and software tools designed to mitigate these deficits. I demonstrate the impact of metallicity on mixing prescriptions, present empirically calibrated convective mixing length parameters for eight stellar objects, and present a software package designed to translate stellar evolutionary information into particle distributions which can serve as initial conditions for 3-D stellar dynamical simulations. This talk will discuss four studies which advance the utility of stellar evolution codes, especially DSEP (The Dartmouth Stellar Evolution Program) and MESA (Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics).