Protostars and Planets VI, Heidelberg, July 15-20, 2013

Poster 1B014

Column density estimation: Tree-based method implementation

Valdivia, Valeska (LERMA/LRA)

Abstract:
The radiative transfer plays a crucial role in several astrophysical processes. In particular for the star formation problem it is well established that stars form in the densest and coolest regions in molecular clouds then understanding the interstellar cycle becomes crucial. The physics of dense gas requires the knowledge of the UV radiation that regulates the physics and the chemistry within the molecular cloud. The numerical modelization needs the calculation of column densities in any direction for each resolution element. In numerical simulations the cost of solving the radiative transfer problem is of the order of N^5/3, where N is the number of resolution elements. The exact calculation is in general extremely expensive in terms of CPU time for relatively large simulations and impractical in parallel computing. We present our tree-based method for estimating column densities and the attenuation factor for the UV field. The method is inspired by the fact that any distant cell subtends a small angle and therefore its contribution to the screening will be diluted. This method is suitable for parallel computing and no communication is needed between different CPUs. It has been implemented into the RAMSES code, a grid-based solver with adaptive mesh refinement (AMR). We present the results of two tests and a discussion on the accuracy and the performance of this method. We show that the UV screening affects mainly the dense parts of molecular clouds, changing locally the Jeans mass and therefore affecting the fragmentation.

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