Ultraviolet Radiation Fields in Star-Forming Disk Galaxies: Numerical Simulations with TIGRESS-NCR

TL;DR

This paper uses advanced numerical simulations to analyze ultraviolet radiation fields in star-forming galaxies, providing insights into their spatial distribution, effects on gas, and methods to interpret observational data.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed simulation framework for UV fields in galaxies and evaluates approximate models, enhancing interpretation of observational data like JWST dust emission maps.

Findings

Most gas exposed to LyC radiation is in ionization-recombination equilibrium.

Simplified LyC models can estimate neutral fractions and mean free paths from emission measure maps.

UV radiation fields correlate with gas properties and vary spatially and temporally.

Abstract

With numerical simulations that employ adaptive ray-tracing (ART) for radiative transfer at the same time as evolving gas magnetohydrodynamics, thermodynamics, and photochemistry, it is possible to obtain a high resolution view of ultraviolet (UV) fields and their effects in realistic models of the multiphase interstellar medium. Here, we analyze results from TIGRESS-NCR simulations, which follow both far-UV (FUV) wavelengths, important for photoelectric heating and PAH excitation, and the Lyman continuum (LyC), which photoionizes hydrogen. Considering two models, representing solar neighborhood and inner galaxy conditions, we characterize the spatial distribution and time variation of UV radiation fields, and quantify their correlations with gas. We compare four approximate models for the FUV to simulated values to evaluate alternatives when full ART is infeasible. By convolving FUV radiation with density, we produce mock maps of dust emission. We introduce a method to calibrate mid-IR observations, for example from JWST, to obtain high resolution gas surface density maps. We then consider the LyC radiation field, finding most of the gas exposed to this radiation to be in ionization-recombination equilibrium and to have a low neutral fraction. Additionally, we characterize the ionization parameter as a function of environment. Using a simplified model of the LyC radiation field, we produce synthetic maps of emission measure (EM). We show that the simplified model can be used to extract an estimate of the neutral fraction of the photoionized gas and mean free path of ionizing radiation from observed EM maps in galaxies.