Journal
MONTHLY NOTICES OF THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY
Volume 437, Issue 3, Pages 2816-2830Publisher
OXFORD UNIV PRESS
DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stt2099
Keywords
radiative transfer; scattering; methods: numerical; H ii regions; galaxies: ISM; diffuse radiation
Categories
Funding
- STFC
- Large Facilities Capital Fund of BIS
- Durham University
- Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO)
- NOVA
- European Research Council under the European Union [278594]
- Marie Curie Training Network CosmoComp [PITN-GA-2009-238356]
- European Union [301096-proFeSsoR]
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A substantial fraction of all ionizing photons originate from radiative recombinations. However, in radiative transfer calculations this recombination radiation is often assumed to be absorbed 'on-the-spot' because for most methods the computational cost associated with the inclusion of gas elements as sources is prohibitive. We present a new, CPU and memory efficient implementation for the transport of ionizing recombination radiation in the traphic radiative transfer scheme. traphic solves the radiative transfer equation by tracing photon packets at the speed of light and in a photon-conserving manner in spatially adaptive smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulations. Our new implementation uses existing features of the traphic scheme to add recombination radiation at no additional cost in the limit in which the fraction of the simulation box filled with radiation approaches 1. We test the implementation by simulating an H ii region in photoionization equilibrium and comparing to reference solutions presented in the literature, finding excellent agreement. We apply our implementation to discuss the evolution of the H ii region to equilibrium. We show that the widely used case A and B approximations yield accurate ionization profiles only near the source and near the ionization front, respectively. We also discuss the impact of recombination radiation on the geometry of shadows behind optically thick absorbers. We demonstrate that the shadow region may be completely ionized by the diffuse recombination radiation field and discuss the important role of heating by recombination radiation in the shadow region.
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