event
Tuesday 07 Nov 2017: Modelling feedback from massive stars using Monte Carlo Radiation Hydrodynamics
Ahmad Ali - University of Exeter
4th Floor Interaction Area 11:15-11:45
Massive stars can drastically disrupt the gas clouds in which they are born via photoelectric heating and radiation pressure. This can affect the formation of new stars - triggering it via gas compression or inhibiting it via gas dispersal. We investigate these effects using Monte Carlo radiation hydrodynamics and produce synthetic observations to directly compare our models with real star-forming regions.
Our Monte Carlo radiative transfer (MCRT) scheme has a high level of microphysical detail, including heating and cooling processes of H, He, and metals (such as photoelectric heating, as well as cooling via recombination lines and collisionally-excited forbidden lines), and dust processes. The highly parallelisable nature of MCRT allows us to accurately calculate temperatures and ionisation states step-by-step with the hydrodynamics, capturing changes in one that will necessarily affect the other.
We present our fiducial model, a 1000 Msol cloud undergoing gravitational collapse and turbulence, with a 35 Msol star emitting radiation. We follow the evolution of the cloud under radiation pressure and ionisation feedback, finding that most of the cloud material leaves the simulation volume within a Myr, or half a free-fall time, due to the rapidly expanding ionization front.
