Paper detail

A new hybrid radiative transfer method for massive star formation

Frequency-dependent/hybrid approaches for stellar irradiation are of primary importance in numerical simulations of massive star formation. We seek to compare outflow and accretion mechanisms in star formation simulations. We investigate the accuracy of a hybrid radiative transfer method using the gray M1 closure relation for proto-stellar irradiation and gray flux-limited diffusion (FLD) for photons emitted everywhere else. We have coupled the FLD module of the adaptive-mesh refinement code Ramses with Ramses-RT, which is based on the M1 closure relation. Our hybrid (M1+FLD) method takes an average opacity at the stellar temperature for the M1 module, instead of the local environmental radiation field. We have tested this approach in radiative transfer tests of disks irradiated by a star for three levels of optical thickness and compared the temperature structure with RADMC-3D and MCFOST. We applied it to a radiation-hydrodynamical simulation of massive star formation. Our tests validate our hybrid approach for determining the temperature structure of an irradiated disk in the optically-thin and moderately optically-thick regimes and the most optically-thick test shows the limitation of our approach. The optically-thick setups highlight the ability of the hybrid method to partially capture the self-shielding in the disk while the FLD cannot. The radiative acceleration is 100 times greater with the hybrid method. It consistently leads to about +50% more extended and wider-angle radiative outflows in the massive star formation simulation. We obtain a $17.6 M_\odot$ at $t{\simeq}0.7 τ_\mathrm{ff}$, while the accretion phase is ongoing. Finally, despite the use of refinement to resolve the radiative cavities, no Rayleigh-Taylor instability appears in our simulations, and we justify their absence by physical arguments based on the entropy gradient. (abridged)