Improved Radiative Transfer Techniques for Hydrodynamic Simulations (2016)

Undergraduates: Gibson Bennett, Chris Frazer

Faculty Advisor: Fabian Heitsch
Department: Physics & Astronomy

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Astrophysical simulations of the Interstellar Medium have been extensively used in the past to increase our understanding of how molecular gas clouds evolve and how stars form. However, not all hydrodynamics codes are equipped with the tools necessary for accurately modeling stellar radiation. In order to simulate interactions between stars and molecular gas, we present a fast radiative transfer scheme which has been implemented into the grid-based hydrodynamics code, Athena. We will use an adaptive ray tree based on the HEALpix discretization and will include triangular shaped cloud (TSC) interpolation in order to alleviate numerical artifacts common to similar ray tracing schemes. We will test our scheme using a simulation of the ionization of a molecular gas cloud due to stellar radiation.