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For a brief summary of the capabilities of MESA, take a look at this presentation by Matteo Cantiello. (He has also provided a Keynote version.)
MESA's full capabilities are documented in the instrument papers. Looking through the figures will give you a feel for the broad range of problems that can be studied using MESA.
- Paper 1 (Paxton et al. 2011)
- Paper 2 (Paxton et al. 2013)
- Paper 3 (Paxton et al. 2015)
- Paper 4 (Paxton et al. 2018)
- Paper 5 (Paxton et al. 2019)
Additional capabilities are documented by MESA users in their publications
- Citations to Instrument Paper 1
- Citations to Instrument Paper 2
- Citations to Instrument Paper 3
- Citations to Instrument Paper 4
- Citations to Instrument Paper 5
To give you yet more flavor of what MESA can do, here are some movies made using png output from mesa/star.
This movie has more than you ever wanted to know about the evolution of a 1 Msun star from pre-main sequence to cool white dwarf. (61MB)
Here is the evolution of a 2 Msun star from He core flash to cool white dwarf with some nice thermal pulses at the tip of the AGB (initial Z = 0.02). (40MB)
This one shows the evolution of a 16 Msun star from ZAMS to core collapse (initial Z = 0.02 and ZAMS uniform rotation = 0.5 of critical). (13MB)
Now for something completely different, here is a movie showing rapid accretion of pure helium onto a neutron star envelope leading to Type I X-ray bursts. (10MB)
This movie shows explosive nucleosynthesis with a 204 isotope net, as discussed in Section 6.2.2 of Paper III. (1.5MB)