Dust Continuum Observations of Protostars: Constraining Properties with Simulations

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the reliability of spectral energy distribution modeling for unresolved protostars by analyzing dust continuum synthetic observations from realistic simulations, highlighting the challenges in constraining properties without direct imaging.

Contribution

It introduces a method to assess the accuracy of SED-based property inference using synthetic dust continuum observations from detailed simulations.

Findings

SED modeling can have significant uncertainties for unresolved protostars.

Synthetic observations help identify limitations of current SED fitting techniques.

Simulations provide a benchmark for testing observational inference methods.

Abstract

The properties of unresolved protostars and their local environment (e.g., disk, envelope and outflow characteristics) are frequently inferred from spectral energy distributions (SEDs) through comparison with idealized model SEDs. However, if it is not possible to image a source and its environment directly, it is difficult to constrain and evaluate the accuracy of these derived properties. In this proceeding, I present a brief overview of the reliability of SED modeling by analyzing dust continuum synthetic observations of realistic simulations.