The Mysteries of Stellar Evolution in Low Metallicity Environments

[Chronos]

Stellar evolution modeling is a science that, to put it charitably, plods along. Here is one of the more interesting papers I've seen in awhile:

http://www.arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0601502
Stellar evolution of massive stars at very low metallicities

 

[franznietzsche]

Actually a wrench was thrown into our stellar evolution models about a year and a half ago, when Asplund et. al. published revised solar photospheric metal abundances, for which our models do not match helioseismology observations as closely as they did when using previous metallicity measurements. Most work in this field has been directed towards correcting this discrepancy, and identifying the flaws in our models.