PION: Simulating bow shocks and circumstellar nebulae

Abstract

Expanding nebulae are produced by mass loss from stars, especially during late stages of evolution. Multi-dimensional simulation of these nebulae requires high resolution near the star and permits resolution that decreases with distance from the star, ideally with adaptive timesteps. We report the implementation and testing of static mesh-refinement in the radiation-magnetohydrodynamics code PION, and document its performance for 2D and 3D calculations. The bow shock produced by a hot, magnetized, slowly rotating star as it moves through the magnetized ISM is simulated in 3D, highlighting differences compared with 2D calculations. Latitude-dependent, time-varying magnetized winds are modelled and compared with simulations of ring nebulae around blue supergiants from the literature. A 3D simulation of the expansion of a fast wind from a Wolf-Rayet star into the slow wind from a previous red supergiant phase of evolution is presented, with results compared with results in the literature and analytic theory. Finally the wind-wind collision from a binary star system is modelled with 3D MHD, and the results compared with previous 2D hydrodynamic calculations. A python library is provided for reading and plotting simulation snapshots, and the generation of synthetic infrared emission maps using torus is also demonstrated. It is shown that state-of-the-art 3D MHD simulations of wind-driven nebulae can be performed using PION with reasonable computational resources. The source code and user documentation is made available for the community under a BSD3 licence.

27 pages, accepted for publication in MNRAS

References in corpus (31)

• Array Programming with NumPy
• Athena: A New Code for Astrophysical MHD
• Pre-Supernova Evolution of Massive Single and Binary Stars
• The effect of photo-ionization on the cooling rates of enriched, astrophysical plasmas
• Mass loss from hot massive stars
• The Athena++ Adaptive Mesh Refinement Framework: Design and Magnetohydrodynamic Solvers
• A new mass-loss rate prescription for red supergiants
• Radio, X-ray, and gamma-ray Emission Models of the Colliding Winds Binary WR 140
• A Detailed Study of Feedback from a Massive Star
• Models of the circumstellar medium of evolving, massive runaway stars moving through the Galactic plane
• Multiple ring nebulae around blue supergiants
• Wind bubbles within H II regions around slowly moving stars
• Interacting supernovae from photoionization-confined shells around red supergiant stars
• E-BOSS: An Extensive stellar BOw Shock Survey. II. Catalogue second release
• Effects of Magnetic Fields on Photoionised Pillars and Globules
• AMRVAC and Relativistic Hydrodynamic simulations for GRB afterglow phases
• Double bow shocks around young, runaway red supergiants: application to Betelgeuse
• Wind-envelope interaction as the origin of the slow cyclic brightness variations of luminous blue variables
• Mass loss and the Eddington parameter: a new mass-loss recipe for hot and massive stars
• Bow shock nebulae of hot massive stars in a magnetized medium
• Hybrid Adaptive Ray-Moment Method (HARM${}^2$): A Highly Parallel Method for Radiation Hydrodynamics on Adaptive Grids
• The circumstellar medium around a rapidly rotating, chemically homogeneously evolving, possible gamma-ray burst progenitor
• Multi-dimensional models of circumstellar shells around evolved massive stars
• Exploring the Mass Loss Histories of the Red Supergiants
• MHD-shock structures of astrospheres: $\lambda$ Cephei-like astrospheres
• Thermal emission from bow shocks I: 2D Hydrodynamic Models of the Bubble Nebula
• Wind nebulae and supernova remnants of very massive stars
• 3D MHD simulations and synthetic radio emission from an oblique rotating magnetic massive star
• Colliding-wind Binaries with strong magnetic fields
• IRAS 18153-1651: an H II region with a possible wind bubble blown by a young main-sequence B star
• Simulations of Magnetised Stellar-Wind Bubbles