Solar Model Animation
22 Nov 2011The discussion section immediately before Thanksgiving has notoriously low attendance. As the GSI for Stellar Physics, I wanted to reward the students who did come with something fun.
I used MESA to generate an example solar model, beginning on the pre-main-sequence and ending on the white dwarf cooling track.
We spent the whole section watching this and trying to understand how the full model fit in with the analytic estimates we’d been doing throughout the course. (Where was it different? Why?)
Here’s a screenshot taken during the He flash.
You can download a 720p version or a full-size version. Feel free to use it in teaching or talks (with standard attribution).