SUNRISE: Polychromatic dust radiative transfer in arbitrary geometries

Abstract

This paper describes SUNRISE, a parallel, free Monte Carlo code for the calculation of radiation transfer through astronomical dust. SUNRISE uses an adaptive mesh refinement grid to describe arbitrary geometries of emitting and absorbing/scattering media, with spatial dynamical range exceeding 10 4, and it can efficiently generate images of the emerging radiation at arbitrary points in space. In addition to the monochromatic radiative transfer typically used by Monte Carlo codes, SUNRISE is capable of propagating a range of wavelengths simultaneously. This 'polychromatic' algorithm gives significant improvements in efficiency and accuracy when spectral features are calculated. SUNRISE is used to study the effects of dust in hydrodynamic simulations of interacting galaxies, and the procedure for this is described. The code is tested against previously published results. © 2006 RAS.