Testing SALT Approximations with Numerical Radiation Transfer Code Part 1: Validity and Applicability

Understand

Absorption line spectroscopy offers one of the best opportunities to constrain the properties of galactic outflows and the environment of the circumgalactic medium.

• Extracting physical information from line profiles is difficult, however, for the physics governing the underlying radiation transfer is complicated and depends on many different parameters.
• Idealized analytical models are necessary to constrain the large parameter spaces efficiently, but are typically plagued by model degeneracy and systematic errors.
• Comparison tests with idealized numerical radiation transfer codes offer an excellent opportunity to confront both of these issues.