Confronting Simulations and Synthetic Observations
Birka Zimmermann
To learn more about the formation and evolution of massive stars it is important to confront simulations and observations. It is useful to interpret the observational data and to extract the cores’ physical parameters. We can address e.g. the question how massive cores fragment and form (massive) stars, or how long the young, massive stellar objects are embedded in their parental core.
Doing so, we simulate a collapsing core scenario of a subvirial, 1000 M☉ core with an initial radius of 1 pc and a linear magnetic field of 100 μG, which is a birthplace of massive stars.
For the post-processing we use RADMC-3D, which is an open source radiative transfer code that is based on the Monte-Carlo method. Here, we present synthetic observations of the dust emission (top left panel). The advantage of our simulations is that we calculate the dust temperature self-consistently, hence taking into account radiative heating by all young stars as well as shock heating. Thus, RADMC-3D is directly working on the simulated dust temperature. These results are post-processed with CASA, where different, possible ALMA channels and predictable water vapour (pwv) in the atmosphere can be simulated.
We show the results for synthetic observations in different ALMA channels (labeled with ALMA TM1, TM2 and ACA; bottom panels), as well as their combination for two predictable water vapour settings (top middle and top right panel). In synthetic observations most of the structures in the less dense environment are not visible anymore; however, emission of the main star forming regions remain.
This work was performed in collaboration with Dr. Álvaro Sánchez-Monge