mc_zodiac_pimp

Supornatural. And the money rolls in...

I can't stress this enough. I work at a planetarium where I give shows, and I always talk about the merger of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies. Then I ask them (my audience, whether it be 3rd graders or adults) what will happen to the Sun and the Earth (because of this merger) and what will happen to other stars in the galaxy. They always reply that they will collide or blow up, something like that.

Then we look at the Solar System and I ask them to guess how many suns will fit across the solar system (I don't even know, though it would be quick and easy to come up with). Then we zoom even farther out and I ask them how many stars will fit between the Sun and Proxima Centauri. Normally it's here that they realize: a) how tiny the Sun is in relation and b) the vastness of space.

Unfortunately I don't think it sticks. I could ask the audience how many suns would fit edge to edge across 1 light year (after going over this) and I'll still get a double digit or even triple digit answer. We're not talking about Betelgeuse here, guys, or the Pistol Star.

tl;dr: when you work in something people cannot identify with on a sensory basis, they have no idea of the spatial dimensions.

I also run MESA. Any chance that your inlist files are available? Granted I run 8845...which I'd recommend you check out because of the modified hydrocode.

I ask because I'm finding that some of MESA's results might depend on the &controls min_dt settings.

I didn't see any of MESA's astero data in your paper. Do you have predictions based on MESA that you are looking for?

I really like that first link. I think I'll show people that link in my intro to my public show so that they can check it out at home. Thanks! I've shown off the second, too. I remember when that came out, I showed some grade school groups that picture. If I remember right it's ~1B stars, correct? That's what I think the Max Planck press release said.

The problem becomes with scale. What is 1,000,000,000 to an elementary school student? Or a dad who wants to spend a night out with his son? They don't know what 10⁹ is. Same with light-years and AU. I can tell them that Beta Pegasi is 196 light years away (which I just learned from your link) but they won't understand what a light year is! I try to stress it by building speeds. I ask how fast certain things go, point out that the ISS is travelling 26k mi/hr (A number I've heard but never checked)...and then that light travels ~671,000,000 mi/hr. How do you make the jump so that someone can relate that to what they've seen or heard in their every day lives?