PION: Simulating bow shocks and circumstellar nebulae

TL;DR

This paper introduces and tests static mesh-refinement in the PION code for high-resolution 2D and 3D simulations of stellar nebulae, demonstrating its effectiveness through various astrophysical scenarios and providing tools for analysis.

Contribution

The paper implements static mesh-refinement in PION, enabling efficient high-resolution 3D MHD simulations of stellar wind-driven nebulae with practical computational resources.

Findings

Successful 3D simulations of bow shocks and nebulae

Comparison with previous models and theories

Provision of tools for simulation analysis

Abstract

Expanding nebulae are produced by mass loss from stars, especially during late stages of evolution. Multi-dimensional simulation of these nebulae requires high resolution near the star and permits resolution that decreases with distance from the star, ideally with adaptive timesteps. We report the implementation and testing of static mesh-refinement in the radiation-magnetohydrodynamics code PION, and document its performance for 2D and 3D calculations. The bow shock produced by a hot, magnetized, slowly rotating star as it moves through the magnetized ISM is simulated in 3D, highlighting differences compared with 2D calculations. Latitude-dependent, time-varying magnetized winds are modelled and compared with simulations of ring nebulae around blue supergiants from the literature. A 3D simulation of the expansion of a fast wind from a Wolf-Rayet star into the slow wind from a previous red supergiant phase of evolution is presented, with results compared with results in the literature and analytic theory. Finally the wind-wind collision from a binary star system is modelled with 3D MHD, and the results compared with previous 2D hydrodynamic calculations. A python library is provided for reading and plotting simulation snapshots, and the generation of synthetic infrared emission maps using torus is also demonstrated. It is shown that state-of-the-art 3D MHD simulations of wind-driven nebulae can be performed using PION with reasonable computational resources. The source code and user documentation is made available for the community under a BSD3 licence.