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Kevin Volk initially incorporated three large grids of stellar atmosphere continua into Cloudy, and more have since been added since. The table star atlas, table star Rauch,  table star Werner and table star costar commands use these. There are two steps involved in preparing the star files for use by Cloudy: first remap the original stellar atmospheres onto the Cloudy energy grid with the compile stars command, then use these files with the table star commands. The first step is only done once while installing Cloudy.

These are available here.  The single file stars.tar.gz will explode into four files, kurucz.list, kurucz.ascii, werner.ascii,  and stars.htm.  Only the first three are needed.

C96 beta 5 and later can use either the "first generation" (H-Ca) models, or the "second generation" (H-Ni) models.  These are referred to as the old and default stellar atmospheres.  C96 beta 4 and before can only use the first generation files.  The compile stars Rauch and table stars Rauch commands will work with the second generation atmospheres by default.  If the keyword "old" appears on the command line the first generation atmospheres will be used instead.  The names of the first and second generation stellar atmosphere files are totally distinct so both sets can happily coexist in the same directory.

The second generation Rauch atmospheres

These instructions are for the "new" Rauch atmospheres, which include effects of the elements between H and Ni.  The new set has two abundance sets, solar and halo. This can only be used with C96 beta 5 and later.  The reference for these emergent continua is

Rauch T., 2002, H-Ni grid, available at http://astro.uni-tuebingen.de/~rauch  The paper describing the stars is available here.

First obtain the tar files from Thomas Rauch’s Web site.  The link http://astro.uni-tuebingen.de/~rauch/flux.html points to the top level for all the stellar atmospheres.  You want the "second generation H-Ni" set. Click on the "H-Ni" link.  At the bottom of the page you will find two sets of atmospheres.  You want the solar and halo abundances dated July 2002 and June 2002 respectively.  The general format for each atmosphere is temperature_gravity_abundances.bin_0.1.

Uncompress and explode both tar files into a directory. This will create a large number of stellar atmosphere files with names ending with the extension "bin_0.1". Next change to the directory with the star files and execute Cloudy with the single command

This will read in the large number of small files and create the two larger files rauch02_halo.ascii and rauch02_solar.ascii that are needed for the next step. Only these two files need be retained.

The first generation Rauch atmospheres

These instructions are for the "old" Rauch atmospheres, which include effects of the elements between H and Ca.  The old set has two abundance sets, solar and halo. This set of atmospheres extends to higher temperatures than the second generation set.  Versions of Cloudy before beta 5 of C96 can only use this set.

First obtain the tar files from Thomas Rauch’s Web site.  The link http://astro.uni-tuebingen.de/~rauch/flux.html points to the top level for all the stellar atmospheres.  You want the "first generation H-Ca" set. Click on the "H-Ca" link.  At the bottom of the page you will find several sets of atmospheres.  You want two sets of files, for solar and halo abundances.  These are dated Feb 1998 and May 1998 respectively, and note that they are for versions 90.05 and later.  The general format for each atmosphere is temperature_gravity_abundances.wf.

Uncompress and explode these files in a directory. This will create a large number of stellar atmosphere files with names ending with the extension wf. Next change to the directory with the star files and execute Cloudy with the single command

This will read in the large number of small files and create the two larger files rauch_halo.ascii and rauch_solar.ascii that are needed for the next step. Only these two files need be retained.

The CoStar spectra

These are developed by Daniel Schaerer and are described in Schaerer D., et al, 1996ab, A&A 310, 837 and A&A 312, 475, and Schaerer & de Koter (1997; A&A 322, 598).  They are available on the web from  http://www.stsci.edu/ftp/science/starburst/SdK96.html . Download both the Sc1_costar_z004_lb.fluxes and Sc1_costar_z020_lb.fluxes files. 

Compiling the star files

The following files are needed to prepare to compile the stellar atmospheres, so that they can be used in model calculations:

werner.ascii This is a plain ASCII version of the Werner and Heber (1991) grid of hot stellar atmospheres and was downloaded from the Cloudy web site. These data extend from 10^-5 Ryd through 182.25 Ryd.

kurucz.list This is the plain ASCII list of all files in the Kurucz (1991) grid obtained from the Cloudy web site.

kurucz.ascii This is the set of Kurucz (1991) atmospheres obtained from the Cloudy web site. The wavelengths of the grid are stored in nanometers as the first record. These data extend from 9.090 nm (10.0 Ryd) through 1.600´ 10⁵ nm (5.7´ 10^-4 Ryd).

rauch_halo.ascii and rauch_solar.ascii These are the sets of first generation Rauch hot stellar atmospheres,  as produced above with the compile stars old rauch initialize command.  (you don't need this set if you only want to use the second generation atmospheres).

rauch02_halo.ascii and rauch02_solar.ascii These are the sets of second generation Rauch hot stellar atmospheres,  as produced above with the compile stars rauch initialize command.

Sc1_costar_z004_lb.fluxes and Sc1_costar_z020_lb.fluxes - The set of CoStar stellar atmospheres from the STScI site described above.

When the stars are compiled, as described next, the following files will be created: atlas.mod, rauch_solar.mod, rauch_halo.mod, costar_sol.mod, costar_halo.mod, and werner.mod.

Some of the stellar atmosphere files are very large, and reading them using sequential access would be very slow. Direct access is used to read these files in a timely manner.

It is necessary to have Cloudy compile the stellar atmosphere files before they can be used. This both rebins the atmospheres onto the current Cloudy energy grid, and converts it to a direct access binary format.  This only needs to be done once when the code is first installed, or if the continuum energy mesh is changed. Follow these steps to compile the star files:

When doing later photoionization calculations, the code will stop before computing a model if it cannot locate the files when the corresponding table stars command is entered. The code also checks that the energy grids in the star files and the code itself agree, to confirm that the star files are appropriate for the current version of Cloudy.

Only the *.mod files are needed by Cloudy. The files *.ascii, and the *.wf atmosphere files can be deleted or compressed after the compilation is complete. They will only be needed again if the continuum binning within the code is changed. The Rauch *.wf files will never be needed again, unless one of the atmospheres is updated and it is necessary to recreate this set.

Compiling only one of the star sets

Often only one or two of the sets of stellar atmospheres are needed, not the whole lot.   The only option on the compile stars command was introduced to make this possible.  Follow the instructions above, although you only need to get the files needed for the desired atmospheres.  Then execute the compile command with the only keyword, and another keyword identifying the stellar atmosphere, as follows:

compile only atlas stars
compile only werner stars
compile only rauch stars
compile only old rauch stars
compile only costar stars

The code will only try to read the indicated atmosphere, and produce only that mod file.

The resolution of the continuum mesh can be changed by changing the contents of the file continuum_mesh.dat in the data directory.  The code checks that the energy mesh within the compiled stellar atmosphere file agrees exactly with the code's internal grid, and will stop if they do not agree to within machine precision.  If the continuum binning by changing continuum_mesh.dat then it will be necessary to recompile the star files, using the compile stars command.

Next step: run the test suite.

Last changed 03/31/03.
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Copyright 1978-2003 Gary J. Ferland