Cooling and Heating Functions of Photoionized Gas

Abstract

Cooling and heating functions of cosmic gas are a crucial ingredient for any study of gas dynamics and thermodynamics in the interstellar and intergalactic medium. As such, they have been studied extensively in the past under the assumption of collisional ionization equilibrium. However, for a wide range of applications, the local radiation field introduces a non-negligible, often dominant, modification to the cooling and heating functions. In the most general case, these modifications cannot be described in simple terms, and would require a detailed calculation with a large set of chemical species using a radiative transfer code (the well-known code Cloudy, for example). We show, however, that for a sufficiently general variation in the spectral shape and intensity of the incident radiation field, the cooling and heating functions can be approximated as depending only on several photoionization rates, which can be thought of as representative samples of the overall radiation field. This dependence is easy to tabulate and implement in cosmological or galactic-scale simulations, thus economically accounting for an important but rarely-included factor in the evolution of cosmic gas. We also show a few examples where the radiation environment has a large effect, the most spectacular of which is a quasar that suppresses gas cooling in its host halo without any mechanical or non-radiative thermal feedback.