The Victoria‐Regina Stellar Models: Evolutionary Tracks and Isochrones for a Wide Range in Mass and Metallicity that Allow for Empirically Constrained Amounts of Convective Core Overshooting

Abstract

Seventy-two grids of stellar evolutionary tracks, along with the means to generate isochrones and luminosity/color functions from them, are presented in this investigation. Sixty of them extend (and encompass) the sets of models reported by VandenBerg et al. for 17 [Fe/H] values from -2.31 to -0.30 and α-element abundances corresponding to [α/Fe] = 0.0, 0.3, and 0.6 (at each iron abundance) to the solar metallicity and to sufficiently high masses (up to ~2.2 M ☉ ) that isochrones may be computed for ages as low as 1 Gyr. The remaining grids contain tracks for masses from 0.4 to 4.0 M ☉ and 12 [Fe/H] values between -0.60 and +0.49 (assuming solar metal-to-hydrogen number abundance ratios): in this case, isochrones may be calculated down to ~0.2 Gyr. The extent of convective core overshooting has been modeled using a parameterized version of the Roxburgh criterion, in which the value of the free parameter at a given mass and its dependence on mass have been determined from analyses of binary star data and the observed color-magnitude diagrams for several open clusters. Because the calculations reported herein satisfy many empirical constraints, they should provide useful probes into the properties of both simple and complex stellar populations.