Installation

METISSE can be used in two different ways:

  1. As a standalone code for evolving populations of single stars.

  2. Integrated within binary population synthesis codes for evolving populations of binary stars.

1.  Get the code

The code package for METISSE is available at the GitHub Repository. If you plan to run METISSE by itself (standalone mode), obtain the code using one of the following methods:

1.1.  Clone the repository

If you have Git installed, open a terminal and run:

git clone https://github.com/TeamMETISSE/METISSE.git

This will create a local copy of the METISSE source code in a folder named METISSE.

1.2.  Download as a ZIP archive

If you prefer not to use Git:

  • Go to the METISSE GitHub repository

  • Click the green “Code” button.

  • Select “Download ZIP”.

  • Extract the downloaded archive to your desired location.

To download METISSE with other codes, see code-specific instructions on this page.

2.  Get the compiler

Regardless of how you use it, METISSE must be compiled before use. It requires a Fortran compiler — specifically gfortran, which comes with GCC 6.4.0 or newer version.

Check your compiler version with:

gcc --version

Check out this page if you need help installing gfortran.

3.  Input tracks

METISSE also requires a set of stellar tracks to work.

A set of sample tracks for testing METISSE can be downloaded from zenodo. The tracks have been computed using the stellar evolution code MESA and are ready for use with METISSE.

  • The folder hydrogen contains stellar tracks with initial masses between 0.1 and 300 M_\odot.

  • The folder helium contains tracks of naked helium stars in the mass range 0.3 and 150 M_\odot.

  • The tracks are for non-rotating stars at solar metallicity (Z=0.02).

METISSE also supports a range of pre-published tracks, for example:

  1. MIST (Choi et al., 2016)-

    EEP Tracks from MIST dataset can be downloaded from the website, while the corresponding metallicity and format files needed by METISSE are available from this page.

  2. BoOST (Szécsi et al., 2022)-

    Stellar model grids for the BoOST dataset, computed with the Bonn Code and coverted to EEP-format, are available here. The helper files required for METISSE are available here.

The provided metallicity file examples are configured for solar metallicity, but can be easily modified to work with eep tracks of other metallicities from the corresponding set. For more details, see metallicity controls.

One can also use their custom set of hydrogen and helium stellar tracks, computed using different input parameters, or even different stellar evolution codes with METISSE. For instructions on how to use a custom set of input stellar tracks with METISSE, refer to using custom input tracks.

4.  Run METISSE

Refer to the following pages for build instructions and examples for METISSE:

  1. Using METISSE directly.

  2. Using METISSE with binary evolution codes.