pdspy: Radiative Transfer Modeling Tools for the ALMA Era and Beyond

Patrick Sheehan

Poster -- Star-forming regions, Disks

The unprecedented resolution and sensitivity of ALMA have revolutionized our view of protostellar and protoplanetary disks, and our understanding of the star and planet formation process. This, coupled with the availability of powerful radiative transfer codes, the increased power and availability of personal computing systems and supercomputers, and an increased focus on statistics and the development of suites of rigorous statistical tools suggest that we can improve the tools we use to study disks to get the most from our data. To that end I present pdspy, a new publicly available code to do detailed modeling of disks. pdspy links state-of-the-art Markov Chain Monte Carlo fitting with detailed dust and gas radiative transfer codes to rigorously model the structure of disks. It can handle a broad range of data, including continuum and spectral line millimeter observations, broadband spectra, and multi-wavelength imaging, and employs a flexible disk+envelope model with a huge selection of tunable parameters. Here I will present the pdspy code, examples of science that can and have been done, and planned future capabilities in hopes that the community will find the code useful for their own science.