Professor Meng Sun
Professor Meng Sun is a theoretical astrophysicist studying how stars live, change, and interact with their companions. Her research focuses on stellar oscillations, tides, and binary stars, especially systems where two stars exchange mass, angular momentum, and energy. She is currently based at the National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and is visiting Clare Hall and the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge.
Meng develops numerical models and open-source tools to connect the hidden internal physics of stars with observable signals, such as stellar pulsations, orbital evolution, and the properties of binary systems. She is a developer of GYRE-Tides, a tool for modelling how stars respond to tidal forcing, and has worked extensively with MESA, a widely used stellar evolution code. She is also involved in POSYDON, a framework for modelling large populations of binary stars.
Before joining NAOC, Meng received her PhD from the University of Virginia and held postdoctoral positions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Northwestern University. Her broader goal is to use theoretical models and observations together to understand the lives of stars and the systems they form.
Select publications
- Sun, Meng; Xia, Hongbo*; Gossage, Seth; Kalegera, Vicky, and 4 more, “Tides in Massive Binaries: Numerical Solutions and Semi-Analytical Comparisons”, 2026, ApJ, 998, 32;
- Sun, Meng; Townsend, R. H. D; Xia, Hongbo; Numerical Non-Adiabatic Tidal Calculations with GYRE-tides: The WASP-12 Test Case, 2025, ApJL, 995, 29;
- Sun, Meng; Gossage, Seth; Leiner, Emily M.; Geller, Aaron M., “Stellar Spin Down in Post-Mass Transfer Binary Systems”, 2024, ApJ, 971, 80;
- Sun, Meng; Levina, Sasha; Gossage, Seth; Kalogera, Vicky, and 3 more, “The Effects of Wind Roche-lobe Overflow in Binary Evolution”, 2024, ApJ, 969, 8;
- Sun, Meng; Townsend, R. H. D.; Guo, Zhao, “gyre_tides: Modeling binary tides within the gyre stellar oscillation code”, 2023, ApJ, 945, 43;
- Sun, Meng; Mathieu, Robert D., “WOCS 4540: Detailed Analysis of a Very Long Orbital Period Blue Straggler”, 2023, ApJ, 944, 89;
- Sun, Meng; Mathieu, Robert D.; Leiner, Emily M.; Townsend, R. H. D., “WOCS 5379: Detailed Analysis of the Evolution of a Post-Mass-Transfer Blue Straggler”, 2021, ApJ, 908, 7;
- Sun, Meng; Arras, Phil; Weinberg, Nevin N.; Troup, Nicholas W.; Majewski, Steven R., “Orbital Decay in Binaries Containing Post-Main Sequence Stars”, 2018, MNRAS, 481, 4077.
Further links
Personal site: https://sunmeng1118.wixsite.com/mysite
