Brian Svoboda
I am an Assistant Scientist at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Socorro, New Mexico. I support Very Large Array (VLA) operations and conduct research in star formation, spectroscopic model fitting, and novel methods in radio astronomy. Prior to my appointment at the NRAO, I was a Jansky Postdoctoral Fellow at the NRAO, and earned my Ph.D. in astronomy at the University of Arizona.
Session
We present a new single-zone, non-LTE radiative transfer code, Jadex (https://github.com/autocorr/Jadex.jl), for estimating the gas kinetic temperature and volume densities of molecular clouds. The software is written in the Julia programming language and numerically optimized for the repeated likelihood evaluations needed for Bayesian parameter estimation using Markov-Chain Monte Carlo methods. As a demonstration, we estimate gas kinetic temperatures of dense cores detected in CMZoom, the SMA survey of the Milky Way's Central Molecular Zoom (CMZ), using the three K-doublet transitions of formaldehyde near 218 GHz. We report initial results from a comparison of the measured temperatures to core evolutionary states. Finally, we assess Julia's suitability for moderate size applications in numerical computing for astronomy.