Open Accesssunrise : polychromatic dust radiative transfer in arbitrary geometries
Author(s) -
Jonsson Patrik
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
monthly notices of the royal astronomical society
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.058
H-Index - 383
eISSN - 1365-2966
pISSN - 0035-8711
DOI - 10.1111/j.1365-2966.2006.10884.x
Subject(s) - sunrise , physics , radiative transfer , monte carlo method , monochromatic color , wavelength , computational physics , sky , astrophysics , optics , statistics , mathematics
This paper describes sunrise , a parallel, free Monte Carlo code for the calculation of radiation transfer through astronomical dust. sunrise uses an adaptive mesh refinement grid to describe arbitrary geometries of emitting and absorbing/scattering media, with spatial dynamical range exceeding 10 4 , and it can efficiently generate images of the emerging radiation at arbitrary points in space. In addition to the monochromatic radiative transfer typically used by Monte Carlo codes, sunrise is capable of propagating a range of wavelengths simultaneously. This ‘polychromatic’ algorithm gives significant improvements in efficiency and accuracy when spectral features are calculated. sunrise is used to study the effects of dust in hydrodynamic simulations of interacting galaxies, and the procedure for this is described. The code is tested against previously published results.