Digital Demo Room
Stellar Structure and Evolution Simulator





Instructions

      The simplest way to utilize this site is to view the previously made movies on the beginner page. These movies will cover most of the interesting general behavior in star evolution.

If you want to watch evolution of specifically massed stars, the intermediate page should be used. Mass is by far the most important variable in a star and changing mass or time is all you need to do to see any kind of star.

The advanced page is used for people who want more control over the parameters. Mass still drives the simulation, and any other variables not entered will be set at defaults. Metalicity affects the temperature of the star somewhat, and can be interesting.

The most useful feature of the advanced page is the random star ability. You can specify the range you want the stars to appear in, though a default is selected otherwise. This way, the HR diagram of a star cluster can be shown instead of just a handful of stars.

Beginning and End time should only be changed by someone who is fairly familiar with the times involved for the stars being evolved. The point of changing times is to center the movie on a specific phase of the star, but you have to know what times that phase occurs at in the first place.

Frames affect the size and time of the movie. Both the time it takes to make the movie and filesize of the movie are porportional to number of frames.

Star formation is more complicated still. Initial burst is the default option and recommended. Star bursts divides the stars the movie would normally create into the times given below (time zero is always included). Continous creation creates random stars (within the range selected under number of random stars) throughout the simulation. This simulates most known star evolution. Decreasing continous evolution is probably the most accurate, but there are places where it has increased or maintained a constant rate.

If only a single star is evolved, a box on the right represents the spin and radius of that star. The radius is logarithmic and the spin is accurate conceptually, but not numerically.


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