Time-dependent MHD shocks and line intensity ratios in the HH 30 jet: A focus on cooling function and numerical resolution

TL;DR

This study investigates how different cooling functions and numerical resolutions affect the simulation of radiative shocks in the HH 30 jet, emphasizing the importance of adaptive mesh refinement for accurate line intensity ratios and physical parameter derivation.

Contribution

It demonstrates the application of adaptive mesh refinement to radiative shock simulations, analyzing the effects of cooling functions and grid resolution on line ratio predictions in astrophysical jets.

Findings

Different cooling routines influence line ratio results depending on the specific line.

Minimum numerical resolution is necessary for convergence in shock simulations.

AMR significantly reduces computational time in radiative shock modeling.

Abstract

The coupling between time-dependent, multidimensional MHD numerical codes and radiative line emission is of utmost importance in the studies of the interplay between dynamical and radiative processes in many astrophysical environments, with particular interest for problems involving radiative shocks. There is a widespread consensus that line emitting knots observed in Herbig-Haro jets can be interpreted as radiative shocks. In this paper we address two different aspects relevant to the time-dependent calculations of the line intensity ratios of forbidden transitions, resulting from the excitation by planar, time-dependent radiative shocks traveling in a stratified medium. The first one concerns the impact of the radiation and ionization processes included in the cooling model, and the second one the effects of the numerical grid resolution. In this paper we apply the AMR methodology to the treatment of radiating shocks and show how this method is able to vastly reduce the integration time. The technique is applied to the knots of the HH 30 jet to obtain the observed line intensity ratios and derive the physical parameters, such as density, temperature and ionization fraction. We consider the impact of two different cooling functions and different grid resolutions on the results. We conclude that the use of different cooling routines has effects on results whose weight depends upon the line ratio considered. Moreover, we find the minimum numerical resolution of the simulation grid behind the shock to achieve convergence in the results. This is crucial for the forthcoming 2D calculations of radiative shocks.