Star Formation with Adaptive Mesh Refinement Radiation Hydrodynamics

Abstract

I provide a pedagogic review of adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) radiation hydrodynamics (RHD) methods and codes used in simulations of star formation, at a level suitable for researchers who are not computational experts. I begin with a brief overview of the types of RHD processes that are most important to star formation, and then I formally introduce the equations of RHD and the approximations one uses to render them computationally tractable. I discuss strategies for solving these approximate equations on adaptive grids, with particular emphasis on identifying the main advantages and disadvantages of various approximations and numerical approaches. Finally, I conclude by discussing areas ripe for improvement.

8 pages, to appear in the Proceedings of IAU Symposium 270: Computational Star Formation

References in corpus (12)

• PLUTO: a Numerical Code for Computational Astrophysics
• Radiation-Hydrodynamic Simulations of Collapse and Fragmentation in Massive Protostellar Cores
• A Minimum Column Density of 1 g cm^-2 for Massive Star Formation
• The Effects of Radiative Transfer on Low-Mass Star Formation
• The Importance of Radiative Feedback for the Stellar Initial Mass Function
• H II regions: Witnesses to massive star formation
• Driving Turbulence and Triggering Star Formation by Ionizing Radiation
• Equations and Algorithms for Mixed Frame Flux-Limited Diffusion Radiation Hydrodynamics
• Magnetohydronamic Evolution of HII Regions in Molecular Clouds: Simulation Methodology, Tests, and Uniform Media
• Radiation Feedback and Fragmentation in Massive Protostellar Cores
• Radiation Feedback, Fragmentation, and the Environmental Dependence of the Initial Mass Function
• Fragmentation and Evolution of Molecular Clouds. II: The Effect of Dust Heating