2016/03/07 by Christine M. Koepferl, Thomas P. Robitaille, James E. Dale +1
Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #Astrophysics and Star Formation Studies #Atmospheric radiative transfer codes #Calibration #Flux (metallurgy) #Radiative flux #Radiative transfer #Scientific Research and Discoveries #Series (stratigraphy) #Synthetic data #Voronoi diagram #astro-ph.GA #astro-ph.IM #astro-ph.SR
paper · pdf · doi:10.3847/1538-4365/233/1/1
17 figures; online data, 5800 synthetic observations (open source), algorithms to create realistic synthetic observations
arxiv created 2016/03/07 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex publication_date 2017/10/24 · arxiv updated 2017/11/01 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Abstract Through synthetic observations of a hydrodynamical simulation of an evolving star-forming region, we assess how the choice of observational techniques affects the measurements of properties that trace star formation. Testing and calibrating observational measurements requires synthetic observations that are as realistic as possible. In this part of the series (Paper I), we explore different techniques for mapping the distributions of densities and temperatures from the particle-based simulations onto a Voronoi mesh suitable for radiative transfer and consequently explore their accuracy. We further test different ways to set up the radiative transfer in order to produce realistic synthetic observations. We give a detailed description of all methods and ultimately recommend techniques. We have found that the flux around 20 μ m is strongly overestimated when blindly coupling the dust radiative transfer temperature with the hydrodynamical gas temperature. We find that when instead assuming a constant background dust temperature in addition to the radiative transfer heating, the recovered flux is consistent with actual observations. We present around 5800 realistic synthetic observations for Spitzer and Herschel bands, at different evolutionary time-steps, distances, and orientations. In the upcoming papers of this series (Papers II, III, and IV), we will test and calibrate measurements of the star formation rate, gas mass, and the star formation efficiency using our realistic synthetic observations.