Make Me A Star!

Welcome to the MMAS Homepage


Make Me A Star (MMAS) is a software package for quickly generating stellar collision remnants. This software could be used in combination with realistic dynamical simulations of star clusters that include stellar collisions. MMAS is already being incorporated into two software packages, TRIPTYCH and TRIPLETYCH, that respectively treat encounters between two stars and among three stars. These packages are controlled through a web interface and treat the orbital trajectories, possible merger(s), and evolution of the merger product.

The primary code developers of MMAS are James Lombardi and Jessica Sawyer Warren. This code is free software licensed under the GNU GPL. If you use this package for work that is to be published, we ask that you inform us, acknowledge use of the package, and cite the following articles:

The details of the algorithms used in this package are described in the second article above.

Obtaining MMAS

To download MMAS, simply click on the following link. To unpack this file, issue the either of the following commands from the command prompt.

tar xzvf mmas1.6.tar.gz

or

gunzip -c mmas1.6.tar.gz | tar xvf -

This will create a directory named mmas1.6 that contains the software package, as well as a sample driver program and sample input files. The README file in this directory discusses the package in more detail. But for a quick start, type the following commands:

cd mmas1.6
make
./meastar

For an even faster start, the last command can be replaced with ./meastar < sample_input

Version Comparison

Version 1.6 is used for our 2003 MNRAS article: it implements a Fehlberg fourth-fifth order Runge-Kutta method to integrate the structure of the collision product, and the default value of the fitted parameter c_3 is fine-tuned to -1.0. Version 1.5 uses a mesh spacing curve to ensure that the shells are always finely spaced in both the core and the outer layers of the collision product. Version 1.4 permits the more massive star to be entered second. Version 1.3 treats the outermost layers of the remnant more accurately. Version 1.2 is the first "standard" version that was used for all the calculations in our 2002 ApJ paper. Version 1.1 was used for the preprint for this paper, and included a different set of callibration coefficients. To download an earlier, currently unsupported, version of MMAS, click below. The README file contains a more detailed description of the changes made in each version.

Acknowledgments

A number of indivuduals have given helpful feedback or contributions to MMAS. We are particularly grateful to Josh Faber, Onno Pols, Peter Teuben, and Ashley Thrall.

This work was supported by the Keck Northeast Astronomy Consortium and by Research Corporation. This work was also partially supported by the National Computational Science Alliance under Grant AST980014N and utilized the NCSA SGI/Cray Origin2000 parallel supercomputer. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants No. AST-0071165 and AST-0205991 at Vassar, as well as under Grant Nos. 9618116 and 0070918 at MIT. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Please send any comments or suggestions to james_c_lombardi@yahoo.com.