papers

Publications (56)

astro-ph.SR2022

Characterizing Observed Extra Mixing Trends in Red Giants using the Reduced Density Ratio from Thermohaline Models

Adrian E. Fraser, Meridith Joyce, Evan H. Anders +2

Observations show an almost ubiquitous presence of extra mixing in low-mass upper giant branch stars. The most commonly invoked explanation for this is thermohaline mixing. One-dim…

astro-ph.SR2025

Beyond MESA Defaults: The Impact of Structural Resolution Uncertainty in p-mode Asteroseismology

Yaguang Li, Meridith Joyce

Observations of pressure modes (-modes) in stars have enabled profound insights into stellar properties, and theoretical stellar evolution and oscillation models are integral to…

astro-ph.IM2022

Gender Disparity in Publishing Six Months after the KITP Workshop "Probes of Transport in Stars"

Meridith Joyce, Jamie Tayar, Daniel Lecoanet

Conferences and workshops shape scientific discourse. The Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP) hosts long-term workshops to stimulate scientific collaboration that would…

astro-ph.SR2018

Not All Stars Are the Sun: Empirical Calibration of the Mixing Length for Metal-Poor Stars Using One-dimensional Stellar Evolution Models

Meridith Joyce, Brian Chaboyer

Theoretical stellar evolution models are constructed and tailored to the best known, observationally derived characteristics of metal-poor ([Fe/H]) stars representing a r…

astro-ph.GA2026

The Milky Way Bulge Extra-Tidal Star Survey: NGC 6569

Joanne Hughes, Andrea Kunder, Kevin Covey +25

We present spectroscopic evidence for tidal debris associated with the bulge globular cluster NGC 6569, based on medium-resolution (R ~ 11,000) Anglo-Australian Telescope spectra o…

astro-ph.SR2025

Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse, Betel-buddy? Constraints on the dynamical companion to Orionis from HST

Jared A. Goldberg, Anna J. G. O'Grady, Meridith Joyce +10

Recently, two independent analyses have asserted that the cause of the Long Secondary Period (LSP) observed in the variability spectrum of our nearest red supergiant, Betelgeuse ($…

astro-ph.SR2021

The relationship between photometric and spectroscopic oscillation amplitudes from 3D stellar atmosphere simulations

Yixiao Zhou, Thomas Nordlander, Luca Casagrande +5

We establish a quantitative relationship between photometric and spectroscopic detections of solar-like oscillations using ab initio, three-dimensional (3D), hydrodynamical numeric…

astro-ph.SR2024

A Buddy for Betelgeuse: Binarity as the Origin of the Long Secondary Period in Orionis

Jared A. Goldberg, Meridith Joyce, László Molnár

We predict the existence of Ori B, a low-mass companion orbiting Betelgeuse. This is motivated by the presence of a 2170-day Long Secondary Period (LSP) in Betelgeuse's lightc…

astro-ph.SR2020

Convective Excitation and Damping of Solar-like Oscillations

Yixiao Zhou, Martin Asplund, Remo Collet +1

The last decade has seen a rapid development in asteroseismology thanks to the CoRoT and Kepler missions. With more detailed asteroseismic observations available, it is becoming po…

astro-ph.SR2023

Bridging the Gap between Intermediate and Massive Stars II: for the most metal-rich stars and implications for Fe CCSNe rates

Giulia C. Cinquegrana, Meridith Joyce, Amanda I. Karakas

The minimum initial mass required for a star to explode as an Fe core collapse supernova, typically denoted , is an important quantity in stellar evolution because it…

astro-ph.EP2021

Characterisation of 92 Southern TESS Candidate Planet Hosts and a New Photometric [Fe/H] Relation for Cool Dwarfs

Adam D. Rains, Maruša Žerjal, Michael J. Ireland +7

We present the results of a medium resolution optical spectroscopic survey of 92 cool (K) southern TESS candidate planet hosts, and des…

astro-ph.SR2021

First results on RR Lyrae stars with the TESS space telescope: untangling the connections between mode content, colors and distances

László Molnár, Attila Bódi, András Pál +25

The TESS space telescope is collecting continuous, high-precision optical photometry of stars throughout the sky, including thousands of RR Lyrae stars. In this paper, we present r…

astro-ph.SR2025

Star-crossed Clusters: Asteroseismic Ages for Individual Stars are in Tension with the Ages of their Host Clusters

Jamie Tayar, Meridith Joyce

A meta-analysis of seismic ages determined for individual stars in the well-studied open and globular clusters NGC 6819, NGC 6791, M67, M4, M19, M80, and M9 reveals both high varia…

astro-ph.SR2023

C3PO: Towards a complete census of co-moving pairs of stars. I. High precision stellar parameters for 250 stars

David Yong, Fan Liu, Yuan-Sen Ting +6

We conduct a line-by-line differential analysis of a sample of 125 co-moving pairs of stars (dwarfs and subgiants near solar metallicity). We obtain high precision stellar paramete…

astro-ph.IM2023

Asteroseismic sounding of bulge globular clusters with the Roman Space Telescope

László Molnár, Csilla Kalup, Meridith Joyce

Globular clusters are relics of the early Universe and they hold clues to many aspects of stellar and galactic evolution. We propose to point the Roman Space Telescope at one or mo…

astro-ph.SR2024

A theoretical framework for BL Her stars -- II. New period-luminosity relations in the Gaia passbands

Susmita Das, László Molnár, Shashi M. Kanbur +6

We present new theoretical period-luminosity (PL) and period-Wesenheit (PW) relations for a fine grid of convective BL Her, the shortest period T2Cs, models computed using MESA-RSP…

astro-ph.GA2023

The Blanco DECam Bulge Survey (BDBS) VIII: Chemo-kinematics in the southern Galactic bulge from 2.3 million red clump stars with Gaia DR3 proper motions

Tommaso Marchetti, Meridith Joyce, Christian Johnson +5

The Blanco DECam Bulge Survey (BDBS) provides near-ultraviolet to near-infrared photometry for ~250 million unique stars. By combining BDBS photometry with the latest Gaia astromet…

astro-ph.GA2021

The GALAH survey: tracing the Galactic disk with Open Clusters

Lorenzo Spina, Yuan-Sen Ting, Gayandhi M. De Silva +28

Open clusters are unique tracers of the history of our own Galaxy's disk. According to our membership analysis based on \textit{Gaia} astrometry, out of the 226 potential clusters…

astro-ph.SR2025

Betelgeuse's Buddy: X-Ray Constraints on the Nature of Ori B

Anna J. G. O'Grady, Brendan O'Connor, Jared A. Goldberg +8

The d Long Secondary Period of Betelgeuse's optical lightcurve and radial velocity motivated the prediction of a low-mass stellar companion, expected to be at maximal a…

astro-ph.SR2022

Spinning up the Surface: Evidence for Planetary Engulfment or Unexpected Angular Momentum Transport?

Jamie Tayar, Facundo D. Moyano, Melinda Soares-Furtado +15

In this paper, we report the potential detection of a nonmonotonic radial rotation profile in a low-mass lower-luminosity giant star. For most low- and intermediate-mass stars, the…

astro-ph.SR2022

Is Thermohaline Mixing the Full Story? Evidence for Separate Mixing Events near the Red Giant Branch Bump

Jamie Tayar, Meridith Joyce

The abundances of mixing--sensitive elements including lithium, [C/N], and 12C/13C are known to change near the red giant branch bump. The explanation most often offered for these…

astro-ph.SR2024

Realistic Uncertainties for Fundamental Properties of Asteroseismic Red Giants and the Interplay Between Mixing Length, Metallicity and

Yaguang Li, Timothy R. Bedding, Daniel Huber +8

Asteroseismic modelling is a powerful way to derive stellar properties. However, the derived quantities are limited by built-in assumptions used in stellar models. This work presen…

astro-ph.SR2019

Stellar Evolution in Real Time: Models Consistent with Direct Observation of Thermal Pulse in T Ursae Minoris

László Molnár, Meridith Joyce, László Kiss

Most aspects of stellar evolution proceed far too slowly to be directly observable in a single star on human timescales. The thermally pulsing asymptotic giant branch is one except…

astro-ph.SR2021

TIC 308396022: a Scuti-- Doradus hybrid with large-amplitude radial fundamental mode and regular g-mode period spacing

Tao-Zhi Yang, Zhao-Yu Zuo, Gang Li +3

We analyse the pulsating behaviour of TIC 308396022 observed by the TESS mission. The star is a high-amplitude Sct star (HADS) that shows a very rich amplitude spectrum using…

astro-ph.SR2026

Custom Colors: A Module for Computing Synthetic Photometry On-the-Fly in Stellar Evolution Calculations, Integrated with MESA and Usable with Other Stellar Evolution Codes

Niall Miller, Meridith Joyce, Philip Mocz

Stellar evolution simulations predict physical quantities such as luminosity, whereas broadband photometric observations measure flux in specific bandpasses; converting the predict…

astro-ph.SR2021

A precise asteroseismic age and metallicity for HD 139614: a pre-main-sequence star with a protoplanetary disc in Upper-Centaurus Lupus

Simon J. Murphy, Meridith Joyce, Timothy R. Bedding +2

HD\,139614 is known to be a 14-Myr-old, possibly pre-main-sequence star in the Sco-Cen OB association in the Upper Centaurus-Lupus subgroup, with a slightly warped circumstel…

astro-ph.SR2020

Standing on the shoulders of giants: New mass and distance estimates for Betelgeuse through combined evolutionary, asteroseismic, and hydrodynamical simulations with MESA

Meridith Joyce, Shing-Chi Leung, László Molnár +3

We conduct a rigorous examination of the nearby red supergiant Betelgeuse by drawing on the synthesis of new observational data and three different modeling techniques. Our observa…

astro-ph.GA2020

The GALAH Survey: Chemical Clocks

Michael R. Hayden, Sanjib Sharma, Joss Bland-Hawthorn +27

Previous studies have found that the elemental abundances of a star correlate directly with its age and metallicity. Using this knowledge, we derive ages for a sample of 250,000 st…

astro-ph.SR2021

The most metal-rich asymptotic giant branch stars

Amanda Karakas, Giulia Cinquegrana, Meridith Joyce

We present new stellar evolutionary sequences of very metal-rich stars evolved with the Monash Stellar Structure code and with MESA. The Monash models include masses of $1-8M_{\odo…

astro-ph.SR2019

Density Conversion between 1-D and 3-D Stellar Models with 1D-MESA2HYDRO-3D

Meridith Joyce, Lianne Lairmore, Daniel J. Price +2

We present 1D-MESA2HYDRO-3D, an open source, Python-based software tool that provides an accessible means of generating physically motivated initial conditions (ICs) for hydrodynam…

astro-ph.GA2025

The Two-infall Model Revisited: Constraints on Milky Way Bulge Assembly from >30,000 Galactic Chemical Evolution Models and Machine Learning

Niall Miller, Meridith Joyce, Christian I. Johnson +4

We constrain the formation history of the Milky Way bulge using a two-infall galactic chemical evolution (GCE) algorithm implemented in the N'OMEGA+ code. We recover a best-fit sce…

astro-ph.SR2022

Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (MESA): Time-Dependent Convection, Energy Conservation, Automatic Differentiation, and Infrastructure

Adam S. Jermyn, Evan B. Bauer, Josiah Schwab +19

We update the capabilities of the open-knowledge software instrument Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (MESA). The new auto_diff module implements automatic different…

astro-ph.SR2024

Stellar Models are Reliable at Low Metallicity: An Asteroseismic Age for the Ancient Very Metal-Poor Star KIC 8144907

Daniel Huber, Ditte Slumstrup, Marc Hon +15

Very metal-poor stars ([Fe/H]<-2) are important laboratories for testing stellar models and reconstructing the formation history of our galaxy. Asteroseismology is a powerful tool…

astro-ph.GA2022

Blanco DECam Bulge Survey (BDBS) IV: Metallicity Distributions and Bulge Structure from 2.6 Million Red Clump Stars

Christian I. Johnson, R. Michael Rich, Iulia T. Simion +12

We present photometric metallicity measurements for a sample of 2.6 million bulge red clump stars extracted from the Blanco DECam Bulge Survey (BDBS). Similar to previous studies,…

astro-ph.SR2024

At least one in a dozen stars exhibits evidence of planetary ingestion

Fan Liu, Yuan-Sen Ting, David Yong +6

Stellar chemical compositions can be altered by ingestion of planetary material and/or planet formation which removes refractory material from the proto-stellar disc. These "planet…

astro-ph.GA2022

Blanco DECam Bulge Survey (BDBS) V. Cleaning the foreground populations from Galactic bulge colour-magnitude diagrams using Gaia EDR3

Tommaso Marchetti, Christian I. Johnson, Meridith Joyce +8

The Blanco DECam Bulge Survey (BDBS) has imaged more than 200 square degrees of the southern Galactic bulge, providing photometry in the ugrizy filters for million uniqu…

astro-ph.SR2024

A theoretical framework for BL Her stars III. A case study: Robust light curve optimisation in the LMC

Susmita Das, László Molnár, Gábor B. Kovács +8

We carry out an extensive light curve comparison of BL Her stars using observations from Gaia DR3 and stellar pulsation models computed using MESA-RSP with the goal to obtain the b…

astro-ph.SR2023

To Grow Old and Peculiar: A Survey of Anomalous Variable Stars in M80 and Age Determination using K2 and Gaia

László Molnár, Emese Plachy, Attila Bódi +11

The globular cluster Messier 80 was monitored by the Kepler space telescope for 80 days during the K2 mission. Continuous, high-precision photometry of such an old, compact cluster…

astro-ph.SR2024

Stellar Evolution in Real Time II: R Hydrae and an Open-Source Grid of >3000 Seismic TP-AGB Models Computed with MESA

Meridith Joyce, László Molnár, Giulia Cinquegrana +3

We present a comprehensive characterization of the evolved thermally pulsing asymptotic giant branch (TP-AGB) star R Hydrae, building on the techniques applied in Stellar Evolution…

astro-ph.SR2022

Bridging the Gap between Intermediate and Massive Stars I: Validation of MESA against the State-of-the-Art Monash Stellar Evolution Program for a 2 AGB Star

Giulia C. Cinquegrana, Meridith Joyce, Amanda I. Karakas

One--dimensional stellar structure and evolution programs are built using different physical prescriptions and algorithms, which means there can be variations between models' predi…

astro-ph.SR2023

The Ages of Galactic Bulge Stars with Realistic Uncertainties

Meridith Joyce, Christian I. Johnson, Tommaso Marchetti +3

Using modern isochrones with customized physics and carefully considered statistical techniques, we recompute the age distribution for a sample of 91 micro-lensed dwarfs in the Gal…

astro-ph.GA2025

Empirical Globular Cluster Ridgeline Construction on Gaia Data

Anett Simon-Zsók, László Molnár, Csilla Kalup +1

We present a new method and a corresponding code to compress the color magnitude diagram of a globular cluster into a representative curve, called a ridgeline, that can be more rea…

astro-ph.SR2018

Suppressed phase variations in a high amplitude rapidly oscillating Ap star pulsating in a distorted quadrupole mode

Daniel L. Holdsworth, Hideyuki Saio, Dominic M. Bowman +5

We present the results of a multisite photometric observing campaign on the rapidly oscillating Ap (roAp) star 2MASS 16400299-0737293 (J1640; ). We analyse photometric

astro-ph.SR2024

RR Lyrae Stars Belonging to the Candidate Globular Cluster Patchick 99

Evan Butler, Andrea Kunder, Zdenek Prudil +16

Patchick 99 is a candidate globular cluster located in the direction of the Galactic bulge, with a proper motion almost identical to the field and extreme field star contamination.…

astro-ph.SR2022

Discovery of post-mass-transfer helium-burning red giants using asteroseismology

Yaguang Li, Timothy R. Bedding, Simon J. Murphy +14

A star expands to become a red giant when it has fused all the hydrogen in its core into helium. If the star is in a binary system, its envelope can overflow onto its companion or…

astro-ph.SR2023

A Review of the Mixing Length Theory of Convection in 1D Stellar Modeling

Meridith Joyce, Jamie Tayar

We review the application of the one-dimensional Mixing Length Theory (MLT) model of convection in stellar interiors and low-mass stellar evolution. We summarize the history of MLT…

astro-ph.SR2022

Five young Scuti stars in the Pleiades seen with Kepler/K2

Simon J. Murphy, Timothy R. Bedding, Timothy R. White +4

We perform mode identification for five Scuti stars in the Pleiades star cluster, using custom light curves from K2 photometry. By creating échelle diagrams, we identify radi…

astro-ph.GA2023

The Milky Way Bulge extra-tidal star survey: BH 261 (AL 3)

Andrea Kunder, Zdenek Prudil, Kevin Covey +19

The Milky Way Bulge extra-tidal star survey (MWBest) is a spectroscopic survey with the goal of identifying stripped globular cluster stars from inner Galaxy clusters. In this way,…

astro-ph.SR2023

A grid of 200,000 models of young Scuti stars using MESA and GYRE

Simon J. Murphy, Timothy R. Bedding, Anuj Gautam +1

The rapidly increasing number of delta Scuti stars with regular patterns among their pulsation frequencies necessitates modelling tools to better understand the observations. Furth…

astro-ph.GA2022

JWST Imaging of Earendel, the Extremely Magnified Star at Redshift

Brian Welch, Dan Coe, Erik Zackrisson +60

The gravitationally lensed star WHL0137-LS, nicknamed Earendel, was identified with a photometric redshift based on images taken with the Hubble Space Tele…

astro-ph.SR2025

Matching seismic masses for RR Lyrae-type and oscillating red horizontal-branch stars in M4

László Molnár, Henryka Netzel, Madeline Howell +2

Globular clusters offer a powerful way to test the properties of stellar populations and the late stages of low-mass stellar evolution. In this paper we study oscillating giant sta…

astro-ph.SR2023

A prescription for the asteroseismic surface correction

Yaguang Li, Timothy R. Bedding, Dennis Stello +11

In asteroseismology, the surface effect refers to a disparity between the observed and the modelled frequencies in stars with solar-like oscillations. It originates from improper m…

astro-ph.SR2022

The K2 Galactic Archaeology Program Data Release 3: Age-abundance patterns in C1-C8 and C10-C18

Joel C. Zinn, Dennis Stello, Yvonne Elsworth +28

We present the third and final data release of the K2 Galactic Archaeology Program (K2 GAP) for Campaigns C1-C8 and C10-C18. We provide asteroseismic radius and mass coefficients,…

astro-ph.SR2023

Comment on the feasibility of carbon burning in Betelgeuse: a response to "The evolutionary stage of Betelgeuse inferred from its pulsation periods," arXiv:2306.00287

László Molnár, Meridith Joyce, Shing-Chi Leung

The recent pre-print by Saio et al. 2023 argues that the supergiant Betelgeuse is already undergoing carbon burning, based on the assumption that all of its light variations are ca…

astro-ph.SR2022

Solar calibration of using ÆSOPUS opacities in MESA

Giulia C Cinquegrana, Meridith Joyce

The simplistic but ubiquitous Mixing Length Theory (MLT) formalism is used to model convective energy transport within 1D stellar evolution calculations. The formalism relies on th…

astro-ph.SR2022

Schwarzschild and Ledoux are equivalent on evolutionary timescales

Evan H. Anders, Adam S. Jermyn, Daniel Lecoanet +4

Stellar evolution models calculate convective boundaries using either the Schwarzschild or Ledoux criterion, but confusion remains regarding which criterion to use. Here we present…