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Session 44 - Double Stars.
Display session, Thursday, January 08
Exhibit Hall,

[44.10] Monte Carlo Simulations of Externally Illuminated Disks

J. L. Hoffman, B. A. Whitney (U. Wisconsin-Madison), K. Wood (CfA), K. H. Nordsieck (U. Wisconsin-Madison)

Since Monte Carlo radiative transfer methods provide straightforward numerical modeling of the interaction of light with matter in complex configurations, they are ideal tools for investigating accretion-disk systems. Most previous Monte Carlo treatments of disk scattering have considered the problem of a disk illuminated by a central source (e.g. Wood et al. 1996, Whitney and Hartmann 1992). In this study, we apply a Monte Carlo code to the case of a geometrically thick disk illuminated from outside, for example, by a binary companion to the disk's central star. The results may help decipher the structural complexities of binary systems such as Beta Lyrae, where it is unclear whether the light polarized by scattering off the accretion disk edge arises from the secondary star within the disk or the external primary star (Hoffman, Nordsieck, amp; Fox 1998, AJ, submitted).

If you would like more information about this abstract, please follow the link to www.astro.wisc.edu/~jhoffman/betlyr.html. This link was provided by the author. When you follow it, you will leave the the Web space for this meeting; to return, you should use the Back button on your browser.

The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: jhoffman@uwast.astro.wisc.edu

Program listing for Thursday