AVIATOR: Morphological object reconstruction in 3D. An application to dense cores

Abstract

Reconstructing 3D distributions from their 2D projections is a ubiquitous problem in various scientific fields, particularly so in observational astronomy. In this work, we present a new approach to solving this problem: a Vienna inverse-Abel-transform based object reconstruction algorithm AVIATOR. The reconstruction that it performs is based on the assumption that the distribution along the line of sight is similar to the distribution in the plane of projection, which requires a morphological analysis of the structures in the projected image. The output of the AVIATOR algorithm is an estimate of the 3D distribution in the form of a reconstruction volume that is calculated without the problematic requirements that commonly occur in other reconstruction methods such as symmetry in the plane of projection or modelling of radial profiles. We demonstrate the robustness of the technique to different geometries, density profiles, and noise by applying the AVIATOR algorithm to several model objects. In addition, the algorithm is applied to real data: We reconstruct the density and temperature distributions of two dense molecular cloud cores and find that they are in excellent agreement with profiles reported in the literature. The AVIATOR algorithm is thus capable of reconstructing 3D distributions of physical quantities consistently using an intuitive set of assumptions.

11 pages, 16 figures, accepted for publication by Astronomy & Astrophysics. v2: Typo in Eq. 3 corrected. The AVIATOR code and a Jupyter notebook illustrating its use is publicly available at https://github.com/BirgitHa/AVIATOR

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