Radiation hydrodynamics simulations of massive star formation using Monte Carlo radiation transfer

TL;DR

This paper presents radiation hydrodynamics simulations of massive star formation, employing Monte Carlo radiation transfer to analyze the development of bipolar cavities and accretion processes.

Contribution

It introduces a novel simulation approach combining radiation hydrodynamics with Monte Carlo radiation transfer for massive star formation.

Findings

Bipolar cavities driven by radiation are high-speed and strong.

Accretion occurs stochastically from a circumstellar disc.

Spectral energy distributions and images are computed for observational comparison.

Abstract

We present a radiation hydrodynamics simulation of the formation of a massive star using a Monte Carlo treatment for the radiation field. We find that strong, high speed bipolar cavities are driven by the radiation from the protostar, and that accretion occurs stochastically from a circumstellar disc. We have computed spectral energy distributions and images at each timestep, which may in future be used to compare our models with photometric, spectroscopic, and interferometric observations of young massive stellar objects.