Can Cooling and Heating Functions be Modeled with Homogeneous Radiation Fields?

TL;DR

This study investigates whether cooling and heating functions in simulated galaxies can be accurately modeled using homogeneous radiation fields, finding that they cannot due to complex spatial and temporal variations.

Contribution

The paper demonstrates that a single, spatially constant radiation field cannot adequately describe the thermodynamics of gas in galaxy simulations.

Findings

Median ISM and instantaneous functions are similar within variation.

Actual gas rates do not match median or instantaneous functions.

Thermodynamics cannot be captured by a single homogeneous radiation model.

Abstract

Cooling and heating functions describe how radiative processes impact the thermal state of a gas as a function of its temperature and other physical properties. In a most general case the functions depend on the detailed distributions of ionic species and on the radiation spectrum. Hence, these functions may vary on a very wide range of spatial and temporal scales. In this paper, we explore cooling and heating functions between $5\leq z \leq10$ in simulated galaxies from the Cosmic Reionization On Computers (CROC) project. We compare three functions. First, the actual cooling and heating rates of hydrodynamic cells as a function of cell temperature. Second, the median cooling and heating functions computed using median interstellar medium (ISM) properties (median ISM). Last, the median of the cooling and heating functions of all gas cells (instantaneous). We find that the median ISM and instantaneous approaches to finding a median cooling and heating function give identical results within the spread due to cell-to-cell variation. However, the actual cooling (heating) rates experienced by the gas at different temperatures in the simulations do not correspond to either summarized cooling (heating) functions. In other words, the thermodynamics of the gas in the simulations cannot be described by a single set of a cooling plus a heating function with a spatially constant radiation field that could be computed with common tools, such as Cloudy.