Extensive mass and age coverage

The current release consists of masses ranging from 0.1 to 300 solar masses and log(Age) ranging from 5 to 10.3. We're currently working on extending the models down to the brown dwarf regime.

Pre-main sequence to advanced evolutionary phases

Stars are evolved continuously to central hydrogen depletion, white dwarf cooling sequence, or central carbon depletion depending on the stellar mass.

Wide range in metallicities

The current version of models adopt solar-scaled abundances from Asplund et al. (2009), with metallicities ranging from [Fe/H] = -4 to 0.5. We're currently working on creating models with non-solar-scaled abundances

Brief Overview of the Models

We started the MIST project in 2012 with the goal of building large grids of single-star stellar evolutionary models extending across all evolutionary phases for all relevant masses & metallicities, and with the computational speed to allow a wide exploration of parameter space. The MIST stellar evolutionary tracks are computed with the Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (MESA) code. MESA is an open-source stellar evolution package that is undergoing active development with a large user base worldwide. The current release of MIST models are computed with MESA version v7503. The evolutionary tracks output from MESA are transformed into isochrones using A. Dotter's iso package. See README_OVERVIEW for more details.

Please cite the following papers in a publication that makes use of the MIST models:
Dotter (2016), Choi et al. (2016), and Paxton et al. (2011, 2013, 2015).

Who Are We?

Jieun Choi (Harvard), Aaron Dotter (Harvard), Charlie Conroy (Harvard), Matteo Cantiello (UCSB/KITP)

This work is supported by the NSF (AST-1524161), NASA (NNX13AI46G and NNG16PJ26C), and the Packard Foundation.

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