Overview

Welcome to the 2023 rendition of the course "Stellar Structure and Evolution" at the institute of astronomy of KU Leuven. This website will contain notes from classes, exercises with included solutions, and examples of computational problems. Below you can find links to the different sections of this website that are available at the moment.

• Introduction
• The equations of stellar structure and evolution
• • Equation of motion
  • Energy equation
  • Continuity equation
  • Eularian versus Lagrangian description
  • Virial theorem
  • Lane-Emden equation
• The energy equation and the equation of state (EOS)
• • Energy equation and global energetics
  • EOS definitions
  • Rewriting the energy equation
  • Deriving a pressure from a distribution
• Degenerate equations of state
• • Deriving $u$ and $P$
  • Pauli exclusion principle and degeneracy
  • Non-relativistic and extremely relativistic regimes of a degenerate EOS
  • Polytropes and the Chandrasekhar mass