HYPERION: An open-source parallelized three-dimensional dust continuum radiative transfer code

TL;DR

HYPERION is a versatile, parallelized 3D dust radiative transfer code that efficiently models complex astrophysical environments, validated against benchmarks and demonstrated on star formation simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a highly generic, problem-independent Monte Carlo radiative transfer code capable of handling various 3D grids with excellent scalability.

Findings

Accurately reproduces benchmark models for protoplanetary disks.

Demonstrates scalability to thousands of processes.

Successfully models dust temperatures, SEDs, and images in star formation regions.

Abstract

HYPERION is a new three-dimensional dust continuum Monte-Carlo radiative transfer code that is designed to be as generic as possible, allowing radiative transfer to be computed through a variety of three-dimensional grids. The main part of the code is problem-independent, and only requires an arbitrary three-dimensional density structure, dust properties, the position and properties of the illuminating sources, and parameters controlling the running and output of the code. HYPERION is parallelized, and is shown to scale well to thousands of processes. Two common benchmark models for protoplanetary disks were computed, and the results are found to be in excellent agreement with those from other codes. Finally, to demonstrate the capabilities of the code, dust temperatures, SEDs, and synthetic multi-wavelength images were computed for a dynamical simulation of a low-mass star formation region. HYPERION is being actively developed to include new features, and is publicly available (http://www.hyperion-rt.org).