TODDLERS: A new UV-mm emission library for star-forming regions. 1. Integration with SKIRT and public release

TL;DR

The paper introduces TODDLERS, a comprehensive UV-mm emission library for star-forming regions, integrated with SKIRT, enabling improved modeling of spectral energy distributions and emission lines in galaxy simulations.

Contribution

It provides a new, publicly available emission library for SKIRT that models star-forming regions with detailed feedback processes and spectral features, enhancing simulation accuracy.

Findings

Better agreement with low-redshift IR observations.

Includes a wide range of emission lines from different gas regimes.

Supports applications in galaxy evolution studies.

Abstract

We present and publicly release a new star-forming regions emission library TODDLERS (Time evolution of Observables including Dust Diagnostics and Line Emission from Regions containing young Stars) for the publicly available radiative transfer code SKIRT. The library generation involves the spherical evolution of a homogeneous gas cloud around a young stellar cluster that accounts for stellar feedback processes including stellar winds, supernovae, and radiation pressure, as well as the gravitational forces on the gas. The semi-analytical evolution model is coupled with the photoionization code Cloudy to calculate time-dependent UV-mm spectral energy distributions (SEDs) from star-forming regions of varying metallicity, star-formation efficiency, birth-cloud density, and mass. The calculated SEDs include the stellar, nebular, and dust continuum emission along with a wide range of emission lines originating from H ii, photo-dissociation, and molecular gas regimes tabulated at high resolution. The SEDs incorporated in SKIRT are generated by calculating a stellar-mass normalized luminosity, which assumes that each emission source is composed of a power-law population of star-forming clouds. When compared to the previous treatment of star-forming regions in SKIRT, TODDLERS shows a better agreement with low-redshift observational data in the IR wavelength range while offering a more comprehensive line-emission support. This paves the way for a variety of applications using simulated galaxies at low and high redshift.