While in Professor Blaes's Lab, I was in charge of reproducing the line the line spectrum of AM CVn systems. These systems are merely a binary system with a accretion disk. The important feature about these systems is that they are small compared to other accretion disks out in space, so we are able to numeri- cally simulate the whole disk.
I wrote a code that could solve for the frequency specturm of the simulated accretion disk at a given time using 3-dimensional data.
To be able to run the code, you will need to have Matplotlib and NumPy insta-
lled. Any of the most recent versions will work just well.
To run the code simpy type on the terminal python amcvn_3d.py or if you are
on a UNIX system run ./amcvn_3d.py.
There are many factors to change depending what you want to run. If you would
like to change the data of the simulation, then place your data in the data
directory and change the variable txt_file in the main code amcvn_3d.py.
You can also choose the viewing angle, number of photon paths and the amount of
points per line.
The script will return three graphs, one for the photon paths illustrated in a 3D plot, the frequency spectrum over the whole frequency range, and the frequency spectrum zoomed in where the absorption lines would be observed if any.
To see some examples, go to the plots directory and look at how the frequency spectrum changes so much just by changing the viewing angle.