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STELCOR
A stellar evolution code for the early evolution of massive stars — the phase where the initial conditions still matter and the star has not yet forgotten how it was born.
The question
What does starting at the main sequence cost you?
Massive stars reach the zero-age main sequence quickly, and the arrival erases a great deal of detail. That is why most grids begin there. It is a reasonable convenience. This is an attempt to price it.
A star of eight to sixty solar masses spends its pre-main-sequence life accreting, contracting and spinning up, and it does so fast enough that the phase is easy to treat as a boundary condition rather than a history. But the surface abundances, the rotation rate and the internal structure at the moment a grid switches on are not free parameters — they are the output of everything that came before, and they propagate forward into every prediction made afterwards.
STELCOR follows that phase explicitly. The question it exists to answer is narrow and, I think, answerable: how much of the spread we observe in young massive stars is set before the main sequence, and how much of it is set after?
The code
Old numerics, treated with respect.
Fortran at the core, Python around the edges. The division is deliberate rather than historical.
Core
Modern Fortran, because the numerical routines at the centre of a stellar evolution code have been debugged over decades by people who were extremely careful, and rewriting them buys speed you do not need at the cost of correctness you cannot easily check.
Around it
Python drives the grids, manages the parameter sweeps and reduces the output. Everything a human touches lives here; everything that has to be right lives in the core. The boundary between the two is the only interface worth defending.
Configuration
- Mass range8 – 60 M☉
- MetallicityZ = 0.014 → 0.0002
- Core languageFortran 2008
- DriverPython 3
- StatusIn development
If you work on this
I would rather be argued with early.
Results, notes and eventually the code itself will appear here rather than in a folder nobody can find. If you work on massive-star evolution and think one of the choices above is wrong, that is a useful email to receive.
Placeholder page. Results, plots, a code repository and a publications list belong here once there is something to show — the structure is ready for them.