EFFICIENT THREE-DIMENSIONAL NLTE DUST RADIATIVE TRANSFER WITH SKIRT

By Maarten Baes, Joris Verstappen, I. de Looze, J. Fritz, W. Saftly, Edgardo Vidal Pérez, M. Stalevski, S. Valcke. 2011

206 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present an updated version of SKIRT, a three-dimensional (3D) Monte Carlo radiative transfer code developed to simulate dusty galaxies. The main novel characteristics of the SKIRT code are the use of a stellar foam to generate random positions, an efficient combination of eternal forced scattering and continuous absorption, and a new library approach that links the radiative transfer code to the DustEM dust emission library. This approach enables a fast, accurate, and self-consistent calculation of the dust emission of arbitrary mixtures of transiently heated dust grains and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, even for full 3D models containing millions of dust cells. We have demonstrated the accuracy of the SKIRT code through a set of simulations based on the edge-on spiral galaxy UGC 4754. The models we ran were gradually refined from a smooth, two-dimensional, local thermal equilibrium (LTE) model to a fully 3D model that includes non-LTE (NLTE) dust emission and a clumpy structure of the dusty interstellar medium. We find that clumpy models absorb UV and optical radiation less efficiently than smooth models with the same amount of dust, and that the dust in clumpy models is on average both cooler and less luminous. Our simulations demonstrate that, given the appropriate use of optimization techniques, it is possible to efficiently and accurately run Monte Carlo radiative transfer simulations of arbitrary 3D structures of several million dust cells, including a full calculation of the NLTE emission by arbitrary dust mixtures.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/08b019697c88a7fcbdf1c451b6c627534b3e854b

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Citations in the corpus

Smooth and clumpy dust distributions in AGN: a direct comparison of two commonly explored infrared emission models (2012, background): “More recently, Stalevski et al. (2012) explored the implications of clumpy and continuous dust distributions on the IR SEDs, by exploiting the three-dimensional radiative transfer code SKIRT (Baes et al. 2011), and found globally no significant dissimilarities in their full set of models.”
The dust covering factor in active galactic nuclei (2016, methodology): “To calculate model SEDs we make use of SKIRT1, a state–of–the– art code for simulating continuum radiation transfer in dusty astrophysical systems (Baes et al. 2003, 2011; Camps & Baes 2015).”
The optical morphologies of galaxies in the IllustrisTNG simulation: a comparison to Pan-STARRS observations (2018, methodology): “In this section, we describe our SKIRT synthetic image generation pipeline, based on the radiative transfer code SKIRT (Baes et al. 2011; Camps & Baes 2015), which we use to produce synthetic images including the effects of dust attenuation and scattering.”
Three-Dimensional Dust Radiative Transfer ∗ (2013, background): “3D dust radiative transfer 25 Depending on the implementation, this can be done up to the location of the scattering event (Lucy 1999), or along the entire path (Niccolini, Woitke & Lopez 2003, Baes et al. 2011).”
An ALMA survey of the SCUBA-2 CLS UDS field: physical properties of 707 sub-millimetre galaxies (2019, methodology): “The most recent post-processing analysis of the model galaxies in EAGLE includes dust reprocessing using the SKIRT radiative transfer code (Baes et al. 2011; Camps & Baes 2015).”
Bimodality of low-redshift circumgalactic O VI in non-equilibrium EAGLE zoom simulations (2016, methodology): “These maps are generated using the SKIRT radiative transfer code (Baes et al. 2011; Camps & Baes 2015) as described in detail by Trayford et al. (in prep.).”
The EAGLE project: Simulating the evolution and assembly of galaxies and their environments (2014, methodology): “This image was created using three monochromatic radiative transfer simulations with the code skirt (Baes et al. 2011) at the effective wavelengths of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) u, g & r filters.”
x-cigale: fitting AGN/galaxy SEDs from X-ray to infrared (2020, methodology): “SKIRTOR is a clumpy two-phase torus model (Stalevski et al. 2012, 2016), based on the 3D radiativetransfer code, SKIRT (Baes et al. 2011; Camps & Baes 2015).2 In SKIRTOR, most (mass fraction = 97”
Molecular hydrogen abundances of galaxies in the EAGLE simulations (2015, methodology): “The optical images were created using three monochromatic radiative transfer simulations with the code SKIRT (Baes et al. 2011) at the effective wavelengths of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) u, g and r filters.”
Three-dimensional radiative transfer modeling of AGN dusty tori as a clumpy two-phase medium (2011, methodology): “We model the torus as the whole, using the 3D Monte Carlo ra- diative transfer code SKIRT.”
The EAGLE simulations of galaxy formation: calibration of subgrid physics and model variations (2015, methodology): “Detailed tests of mock observations derived by coupling EAGLE to the SKIRT radiative transfer algorithm (Baes et al. 2011) will be presented in a forthcoming study (Trayford et al. in preparation).”