Sunrise is a Monte-Carlo radiation-transfer code that calculates the
transfer of radiation through interstellar dust. Its main use is for
generating "simulated observations" of galaxies in hydrodynamic
simulations. Huh?
What does this mean?
Sunrise uses an arbitrary, fully 3-D, geometry, using an adaptive-mesh
refinement grid to describe the problem. It includes
functionality to import geometry from the GADGET and GASOLINE
hydrodynamics codes, or to use an analytic problem description. It
supports arbitrary source distributions, arbitrary observer locations,
and has functionality for using spectra of stellar populations or
Active Galactic Nuclei.
A unique feature of Sunrise is its "polychromatic" algorithm, where
every Monte Carlo ray carries an entire spectrum with it. This
makes it possible to use very high wavelength resolution compared to
monochromatic approaches, where each ray carries a single wavelength.
Sunrise runs in parallel on shared-memory machines, and can use a
Graphics Processing Unit for accelerating some parts of the
calculation.
As an advertisement, below is a movie made by me, Greg Novak and Joel
Primack in 2008, simulating the realistic visual appearance of a
galaxy merger. This movie won a semifinalist award (among top 10
contributions) in the 2008 NSF Science & Engineering Visualization
Challenge
and has even been picked up on popular astronomy blogs.
