Astronomy Colloquium

MESA is an open-source stellar evolution software instrument that is now entering its second decade of development. MESA has become a widely-used tool in both research and education with ~1000 users distributed around the globe. I will briefly summarize some of the key capabilities of MESA and describe how its usage and development is driven by the interaction of theory, modeling, and simulation with ongoing, rapid observational progress in stellar astrophysics. I will also discuss how the capabilities of MESA enable some of my own work studying the fates of accreting and merging white dwarfs.