Effects of Spatial Discretization in Lyα Line Radiation Transfer Simulations

Abstract

We describe the addition of Ly α resonant line transfer to our dust continuum radiation transfer code SKIRT, verifying our implementation with published results for spherical problems and using some self-designed three-dimensional setups. We specifically test spatial discretization through various grid types, including hierarchical octree grids and unstructured Voronoi tessellations. We then use a radiation transfer postprocessing model for one of the spiral galaxies produced by the Auriga cosmological zoom simulations to investigate the effect of spatial discretization on the synthetic observations. We find that the calculated Lyα line profiles exhibit an extraordinarily strong dependence on the type and resolution of the spatial grid, rendering the results untrustworthy at best. We attribute this effect to the large gradients in the hydrogen density distribution over small distances, which remain significantly underresolved in the input model. We therefore argue that further research is needed to determine the required spatial resolution of a hydrodynamical simulation snapshot to enable meaningful Lyα line transfer postprocessing.