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MESA, a piece of software referenced in this article, is a pretty incredible system. (Even referring to it as software underplays the extent of its community an
by mturk 21d ago
MESA, a piece of software referenced in this article, is a pretty incredible system. (Even referring to it as software underplays the extent of its community and impact.)
Many people are involved in MESA and Bill Paxton was always quick to point out the many new folks that worked on it, but this article does a great job of celebrating his impact:
https://www.kitp.ucsb.edu/news/an-accidental-astrophysicist https://www.kitp.ucsb.edu/news/an-accidental-astrophysicist
It's amazing to me that he went from being the voice on the other end of the Mother Of All Demos to having such a major impact on stellar astrophysics during his "retirement." He passed away in 2025.
- vesinisa 20d agoThank you, that definitely was an interesting read. Sad to learn of Bill Paxton's passing. Clearly his legacy and impact however live on, like this research demonstrates. It seems he preferred the term "software instrument" to refer to MESA: > Bildsten and Paxton have taken to calling programs like MESA "software instruments,” according to the latter. “Just like you can’t do observational astrophysics without an instrument like a telescope," he said, "you can’t do computational astrophysics without an instrument such as MESA." It's amazing what impact one good piece of software, freely available to anyone anywhere to use, can have on a field. I think this quote illustrated the problem he was able to solve very well: > Ideally, you want to be able to run an experiment, but you can’t go grab a star, run an experiment for a billion years, and come back later to see how it turned out.