,
Radiative Transfer and Radiative driving of Outflows in AGN and Starbursts
(2012)cite arxiv:1203.6062Comment: 25 pages, 17 figures, submitted to MNRAS.
Аннотация
To facilitate the study of black hole fueling, star formation, and feedback
in galaxies, we outline a method for treating the radial forces on interstellar
gas due to absorption of photons by dust grains. The method gives the correct
behavior in all of the relevant limits (dominated by the central point source;
dominated by the distributed isotropic source; optically thin; optically thick
to UV/optical; optically thick to IR) and reasonably interpolates between the
limits when necessary. The method is explicitly energy conserving so that
UV/optical photons that are absorbed are not lost, but are rather redistributed
to the IR where they may scatter out of the galaxy. We implement the radiative
transfer algorithm in a two-dimensional hydrodynamical code designed to study
feedback processes in the context of early-type galaxies. We find that the
dynamics and final state of simulations are measurably but only moderately
affected by radiative forces on dust, even when assumptions about the
dust-to-gas ratio are varied from zero to a value appropriate for the Milky
Way. In simulations with high gas densities designed to mimic ULIRGs with a
star formation rate of several hundred solar masses per year, dust makes a more
substantial contribution to the dynamics and outcome of the simulation. We find
that, despite the large opacity of dust to UV radiation, the momentum input to
the flow from radiation very rarely exceeds L/c due to two factors: the low
opacity of dust to the re-radiated IR and the tendency for dust to be destroyed
by sputtering in hot gas environments. We also develop a simplification of our
radiative transfer algorithm that respects the essential physics but is much
easier to implement and requires a fraction of the computational cost.
