Skylight: a new code for general-relativistic ray-tracing and radiative transfer in arbitrary spacetimes

Abstract

To reproduce the observed spectra and light curves originated in the neighborhood of compact objects requires accurate relativistic ray-tracing codes. In this work, we present Skylight, a new numerical code for general-relativistic ray tracing and radiative transfer in arbitrary space-time geometries and coordinate systems. The code is capable of producing images, spectra, and light curves from astrophysical models of compact objects as seen by distant observers. We incorporate two different schemes, namely Monte Carlo radiative transfer, integrating geodesics from the astrophysical region to distant observers, and camera techniques with backwards integration from the observer to the emission region. The code is validated by successfully passing several test cases, among them: thin accretion disks and neutron star hot spot emission.

15 pages, 14 figures

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Cited by in corpus (10)

• Fermionic Dark Matter: Physics, Astrophysics, and Cosmology
• Accretion disks and relativistic line broadening in boson star spacetimes
• Relativistic force-free models of the thermal X-ray emission in millisecond pulsars observed by NICER
• Explicit symplectic integrators with adaptive time steps in curved spacetimes
• Accurate analytical modeling of light rays in spherically symmetric spacetimes: Applications in the study of black hole accretion disks and polarimetry
• Imaging fermionic dark matter cores at the center of galaxies
• Synthetic gravitational lens image of the Sagittarius A${}^{\ast }$ black hole with a thin disk model
• A full waveform model for arbitrarily axis-symmetric black hole mergers
• Fast and accurate analytical formulas for light propagation in general static, spherically symmetric spacetimes
• Axion-Photon Conversion Signals from Neutron Stars with Spacetime Curvature Accounted for in the Magnetosphere Model