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PHY 521 Fall 2025

PHY 521: Stars

Equation of State

Solid or Gas?
Maxwell-Boltzmann Distribution and Ideal Gas
Degenerate Electrons
EOS regimes

Convection

Convective temperature gradient
Simulating convection

Nuclear Properties

Mass Excess Visualized
Binding Energy per Nucleon

Reaction Rates

PP Chains
p-p chain vs. CNO
Helium Burning
Ratio of C/O from He burning
Explosive Nucleosynthesis

Integrating Stiff Networks

Integrating Stiff ODEs
Application: Nuclear Reaction Networks
- Integration Example

Stellar Models

Lane-Emden polytrope equation
Solving Lane-Emden via Shooting
Exploring MESA models

Close Binary Evolution

Equipotentials

Explosions!

hot-CNO and breakout
X-ray Burst Timing
One-zone X-ray Burst Model
Simple supernova lightcurve
Nuclear statistical equilibrium
Neutron star structure

Homework solutions

Homework 1 solutions
Homework 2 solutions
Homework 3 solutions

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By Michael Zingale

© 2025; CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0