Housing and Development Newsletter
These restrictions, driven purely by his own interests and desires, laid the foundation for a program that could be used by researchers around the world without a huge investment.
“You can run it on a 4 GB laptop,” Paxton said. MESA uses a simple set of physics equations to model stars as spherical shells. Since spheres are symmetrical, the program can essentially use a 1-dimensional model to simulate a 3-dimensional object, greatly simplifying computational demands.
Paxton designed MESA to be modular: built from semi-independent chunks that work together to achieve a more sophisticated result. For instance, the software has modules for opacity, nuclear reactions and equations of state, among other things. Each module can be used as a stand-alone tool depending on a researcher’s needs.