Three-temperature radiation hydrodynamics with PLUTO: Tests and applications to protoplanetary disks

Abstract

In circumstellar disks around T Tauri stars, visible and near-infrared stellar irradiation is intercepted by dust at the disk's optical surface and reprocessed into thermal infrared; this subsequently undergoes radiative diffusion through the optically thick bulk of the disk. The gas component -- overwhelmingly dominant by mass, but contributing little to the opacity -- is heated primarily by gas-grain collisions. In hydrodynamical simulations, however, typical models for this heating process (local isothermality, $\beta$-cooling, two-temperature radiation hydrodynamics) incorporate simplifying assumptions that limit their ranges of validity. To build on these methods, we develop a ``three-temperature" numerical scheme, which self-consistently models energy exchange between gas, dust, and radiation, as a part of the PLUTO radiation-hydrodynamics code. With a range of test problems in 0D, 1D, 2D, and 3D, we demonstrate the efficacy of our method, and make the case for its applicability to a wide range of problems in disk physics, including hydrodynamic instabilities and disk-planet interaction.

Accepted to Astronomy and Astrophysics; 16 pages, 11 figures incl. Appendix. Comments and questions welcome

References in corpus (19)

• PLUTO: a Numerical Code for Computational Astrophysics
• Asymmetric features in the protoplanetary disk MWC758
• Gas and dust dynamics in starlight-heated protoplanetary disks
• Hydrodynamic Photoevaporation of Protoplanetary Disks with Consistent Thermochemistry
• Spiral Structure in the Gas Disk of TW Hya
• The effects of disk self-gravity and radiative cooling on the formation of gaps and spirals by young planets
• On the planetary interpretation of multiple gaps and rings in protoplanetary disks seen by ALMA
• A highly non-Keplerian protoplanetary disc: Spiral structure in the gas disc of CQ Tau
• Spiral arms in thermally stratified protoplanetary discs
• Combining radiative transfer and diffuse interstellar medium physics to model star formation
• Thermal Waves in Irradiated Protoplanetary Disks
• A radiative transfer module for relativistic magnetohydrodynamics in the PLUTO code
• Thermal Wave Instability as an Origin of Gap and Ring Structures in Protoplanetary Disks
• High Resolution Parameter Study of the Vertical Shear Instability II: Dependence on temperature gradient and cooling time
• Observing planet-driven dust spirals with ALMA
• Thermal structure of a protostellar envelope
• Thermal evolution of protoplanetary disks: from $\beta$-cooling to decoupled gas and dust temperatures
• No self-shadowing instability in 2D radiation-hydrodynamical models of irradiated protoplanetary disks
• On the vortex evolution in non-isothermal protoplanetary discs