Asteroseismology of white dwarfs: comparison between MESA and WDEC

The only way to probe stellar interiors is through asteroseismology, which compares the observed pulsation modes to the ones computed with models. In this poster/talk, we will present the first results of a direct comparison between theoretical periods computed using the Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (MESA) and the White Dwarf Evolutionary code (WDEC) for pulsating white dwarf stars. MESA is an open-source code that computes the full evolution of stars (i.e. self-consistent). WDEC, on the other hand, calculated the white dwarf cooling from relaxing polytopes. With MESA, we evolved stars with initial masses between 1 and 3 solar masses in steps of 0.5 solar masses, and calculated the g-modes at temperatures 13000K to 10000K in steps of 500K, creating “synthetic pulsating white dwarfs”. We then compared these “stars” with our WDEC model grid. The main goal of our project is to quantify the external uncertainties between MESA and WDEC, factoring the computational time differences between the two codes; it takes hours to compute each MESA model vs. a few seconds with WDEC.