Distribution of observationally determined instantaneous accretion rates onto the BH taken at different times (black), and distribution of long-term average BH accretion rates inferred from MT sequence, calculated with MESA, that successfully reproduce the observed characteristics of LMC X-3 (red). The vertical black dashed line shows the critical MT rate for the thermal disk instability model, given by Eq. (13), for the observationally inferred properties given in Table 1.