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Effects of Spatial Discretization in Lyman-alpha Line Radiation Transfer Simulations
- Publication Year :
- 2021
- Publisher :
- arXiv, 2021.
-
Abstract
- We describe the addition of Lyman-alpha resonant line transfer to our dust continuum radiation transfer code SKIRT, verifying our implementation with published results for spherical problems and using some self-designed three-dimensional setups. We specifically test spatial discretization through various grid types, including hierarchical octree grids and unstructured Voronoi tessellations. We then use a radiation transfer post-processing model for one of the spiral galaxies produced by the Auriga cosmological zoom simulations to investigate the effect of spatial discretization on the synthetic observations. We find that the calculated Lyman-alpha line profiles exhibit an extraordinarily strong dependence on the type and resolution of the spatial grid, rendering the results untrustworthy at best. We attribute this effect to the large gradients in the hydrogen density distribution over small distances, which remain significantly under-resolved in the input model. We therefore argue that further research is needed to determine the required spatial resolution of a hydrodynamical simulation snapshot to enable meaningful Lyman-alpha line transfer post-processing.<br />Comment: Accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal
- Subjects :
- Physics
Discretization
AURIGA
010308 nuclear & particles physics
FOS: Physical sciences
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics::Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics
Grid
01 natural sciences
Rendering (computer graphics)
Computational physics
Octree
Space and Planetary Science
0103 physical sciences
Voronoi diagram
Astrophysics - Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
010303 astronomy & astrophysics
Image resolution
Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM)
Line (formation)
Subjects
Details
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....0e5cf1a0928b960dcb9dab23f7d7b397
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2106.00281