Abstract

With the next generation of ground and space-based telescopes (e.g. Herschel, ALMA , e-Merlin) bringing improved resolution to bear on emergent planetary systems, theory and simulation must keep pace to interpret observations. We present a means of directly incorporating Monte Carlo Radiative Transfer (MCRT) techniques into Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) density fields. This allows us to produce synthetic telescope images of these simulations, and to determine the visibility of nonaxisymmetric features such as spiral arms and disc clumps. We demonstrate the technique by considering the HL Tau system, found by Greaves et al (2008) to have a condensation of mass 15 Jupiter masses at ~65 AU (for which they produced an SPH simulation with similar features). We image the SPH simulation to determine the visibility of this clump by the next generation of sub-mm instruments.