Panchromatic Spectral Energy Distributions of Dusty Galaxies with RADISHE. I. Predictions for Herschel: Correlating Colors with Galactic Energy Sources

TL;DR

This paper introduces RADISHE, a new Monte Carlo radiative transfer code for modeling spectral energy distributions of dusty galaxies, demonstrating its efficiency and potential for analyzing Herschel observations to distinguish energy sources.

Contribution

The paper presents RADISHE, a novel self-consistent radiative transfer code that efficiently computes emergent SEDs for complex three-dimensional geometries, with applications to galaxy evolution studies.

Findings

Iterative temperature calculation is faster than relaxation methods.

RADISHE effectively models SEDs for turbulent protostellar cores and galaxies.

Simulated Herschel color-color plots can distinguish AGN-dominated from star formation-dominated galaxies.

Abstract

We present three-dimensional, self-consistent radiative transfer solutions with a new Monte Carlo radiative equilibrium code. The code, RADISHE ($\bf{RAD}$iative transfer $\bf{I}$n $\bf{S}$moothed particle $\bf{H}$ydrodynamics and $\bf{E}$ulerian codes), can be applied to calculate the emergent spectral energy distributions (SEDs) and broadband images from optical to millimeter wavelengths of arbitrary density geometries with distributed sources of radiation. One of the primary uses of this code has been to interface with hydrodynamical codes to calculate emergent SEDs along a simulation time sequence. The primary methodological focus of this paper is on the radiative equilibrium temperature calculation. We find that an iterative calculation of the temperature, which takes as the Monte Carlo estimator for the mean free intensity the sum of photon flight paths, is significantly faster than relaxation temperature calculation methods, particularly when large numbers of grid cells are required, i.e., in modeling three-dimensional geometries such as the dust envelopes of turbulent massive protostellar cores or infrared bright galaxies. We present simulated color-color plots for infrared bright galaxies at a range of redshifts, and unfold these plots as color vs the fractional AGN luminosity, to demonstrate that $\it{Herschel}$ will be able to effectively discriminate between submillimeter galaxies where the energy source is dominated by AGN and those where star formation dominates. [abridged]