Synthetic observations of protostellar multiple systems

TL;DR

This paper creates synthetic observations of multiple protostellar systems with episodic accretion, highlighting the importance of modeling multiplicity for accurate interpretation of protostar observations.

Contribution

It introduces a method to simulate and analyze multiple protostellar systems with episodic accretion, advancing beyond single-protostar models for better observational inference.

Findings

Generated 40,000 synthetic spectra for each system

Demonstrated the complexity of multiple systems in observations

Proposed a Bayesian approach for physical property inference

Abstract

Observations of protostars are often compared with synthetic observations of models in order to infer the underlying physical properties of the protostars. The majority of these models have a single protostar, attended by a disc and an envelope. However, observational and numerical evidence suggests that a large fraction of protostars form as multiple systems. This means that fitting models of single protostars to observations may be inappropriate. We produce synthetic observations of protostellar multiple systems undergoing realistic, non-continuous accretion. These systems consist of multiple protostars with episodic luminosities, embedded self-consistently in discs and envelopes. We model the gas dynamics of these systems using smoothed particle hydrodynamics and we generate synthetic observations by post-processing the snapshots using the \textsc{spamcart} Monte Carlo radiative transfer code. We present simulation results of three model protostellar multiple systems. For each of these, we generate $4\times10^4$ synthetic spectra at different points in time and from different viewing angles. We propose a Bayesian method, using similar calculations to those presented here, but in greater numbers, to infer the physical properties of protostellar multiple systems from observations.