2016MNRAS.463.1500F

We present a method to integrate the gravitational field for general three-dimensional objects. By adopting the spherical polar coordinates centered at the evaluation point as the integration variables, we numerically compute the volume integral representation of the gravitational potential and of the acceleration vector. The variable transformation completely removes the algebraic singularities of the original integrals. The comparison with exact solutions reveals around 15 digits accuracy of the new method. Meanwhile, the 6 digit accuracy of the integrated gravitational field is realized by around 10⁶ evaluations of the integrand per evaluation point, which costs at most a few seconds at a PC with Intel Core i7-4600U CPU running at 2.10 GHz clock. By using the new method, we show the gravitational field of a grand design spiral arm structure as an example. The computed gravitational field shows not only spiral shaped details but also a global feature composed of a thick oblate spheroid and a thin disc. The developed method is directly applicable to the electromagnetic field computation by means of Coulomb's law, the Biot-Savart law, and their retarded extensions. Sample FORTRAN 90 programs and test results are electronically available.