Spectral reconstruction for radiation hydrodynamic simulations of galaxy evolution

¹ Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics, University of Oslo, PO Box 1029 Blindern, 0315 Oslo, Norway
² Department of Physics and Astronomy, McMaster University, Hamilton L8S 4M1, Canada

^⋆ Corresponding author; bernhard.baumschlager@astro.uio.no

Received: 5 October 2023
Accepted: 12 September 2024

Abstract

Radiation from stars and active galactic nuclei (AGN) plays an important role in galaxy formation and evolution, and profoundly transforms the intergalactic, circumgalactic, and interstellar medium (IGM, CGM, and ISM). On-the-fly radiative transfer (RT) has started being incorporated in cosmological simulations, but the complex evolving radiation spectra are often crudely approximated with a small number of broad bands with piece-wise constant intensity and a fixed photo-ionisation cross-section. Such a treatment is unable to capture the changes to the spectrum as light is absorbed while it propagates through a medium with non-zero opacity. This can lead to large errors in photo-ionisation and heating rates. In this work we present a novel approach of discretising the radiation field at discrete photon energies, at the edges of the typically used photo-ionising bands, in order to capture the power-law slope of the radiation field. In combination with power-law approximations for the photo-ionisation cross-sections, this model allows us to self-consistently combine radiation from sources with different spectra and accurately follow the ionisation states of primordial and metal species through time. The method is implemented in GASOLINE2 in connection with TREVR2, a fast reverse ray tracing algorithm with 𝒪(N_active log₂ N) scaling. We compare our new piece-wise power-law reconstruction to the piece-wise constant method in calculating the primordial chemistry photo-ionisation and heating rates under an evolving UV background (UVB) and stellar spectrum, and find that our method reduces errors significantly, by up to two orders of magnitude in the case of HeII ionisation. We apply our new spectral reconstruction method in RT post-processing of a cosmological zoom-in simulation, MUGS2 g1536, including radiation from stars and a live UVB, and find a significant increase in total neutral hydrogen (HI) mass in the ISM and the CGM due to shielding of the UVB and a low escape fraction of the stellar radiation. This demonstrates the importance of RT and an accurate spectral approximation in simulating the CGM-galaxy ecosystem.