An Exact Integration Scheme for Radiative Cooling in Hydrodynamical Simulations

Abstract

A new scheme for incorporating radiative cooling in hydrodynamical codes is presented, centered around exact integration of the governing semi-discrete cooling equation. Using benchmark calculations based on the cooling downstream of a radiative shock, I demonstrate that the new scheme outperforms traditional explicit and implicit approaches in terms of accuracy, while remaining competitive in terms of execution speed.Comment: 7 pages, accepted by ApJS. Revision 2, with error in eqn. 13 fixe