A Parameter Study of the Dust and Gas Temperature in a Field of Young Stars

TL;DR

This paper models the dust and gas temperatures around young stars to improve the realism of large-scale simulations of clustered star formation, considering various heating and cooling processes.

Contribution

It introduces a grid of dust temperature models around young stellar objects using Dusty, accounting for multiple heating mechanisms, to enhance star formation simulations.

Findings

Created a comprehensive grid of dust temperature models

Determined gas temperature assuming energy balance

Enabled more realistic large-scale star formation simulations

Abstract

We model the thermal effect of young stars on their surrounding environment in order to understand clustered star formation. We take radiative heating of dust, dust-gas collisional heating, cosmic-ray heating, and molecular cooling into account. Using Dusty, a spherical continuum radiative transfer code, we model the dust temperature distribution around young stellar objects with various luminosities and surrounding gas and dust density distributions. We have created a grid of dust temperature models, based on our modeling with Dusty, which we can use to calculate the dust temperature in a field of stars with various parameters. We then determine the gas temperature assuming energy balance. Our models can be used to make large-scale simulations of clustered star formation more realistic.