Stellar Collider Input parameters
Collide two stars of your choice and view the evolution track on your screen. The Stellar Collider will interpolate the parameters you enter on a grid of evolution tracks for collision products and present the results. The stellar evolution tracks were calculated with a version of Peter Eggleton's TWIN stellar evolution code, the collisions themselves are calculated with James Lombardi's Make Me A Star package. Details of the collision grids are described in Glebbeek & Pols 2008. The interpolation scheme is essentially the same that described in Pols & al. 1998. There are a few restructions and caveats that you should be aware of:
- The parameters you enter must fall within the parameters of the calculated grid (what these are depends on the grid you interpolate on).
- The Stellar Collider will only be able to calculate evolution tracks for collisions between main sequence stars. In other words, if one of the colliding stars has evolved off the main sequence you will get an error message. In practice you may run into problems if you're trying to collide stars that are near the main sequence turn-off: it's very likely that one of the models needed for the interpolation is not available because the progenitors had actually evolved off the main sequence. In this case, you'll get an error message.
- The evolution tracks can only be calculated for times up to which the evolution tracks are available in the database. Normally this should be fine up to a Hubble time (13.7 Gyr), but your mileage may vary.
At the moment you can only view Hertzsprung-Russell diagrams for individual evolution tracks. Eventually I will update this so you can also simulate a population of stellar collision products.
If you have questions or have problems using the Stellar Collider, let me know!
If you plan to use the Stellar Collider for serious work, definitely let me know!
