An L1 refined projection approximate solution of the radiation transfer equation in stellar atmospheres

This paper deals with the numerical approximation of the solution of a weakly singular integral equation of the second kind which appears in Astrophysics. The reference space is the complex Banach space of Lebesgue integrable functions on a bounded interval whose amplitude represents the optical thickness of the atmosphere. The kernel of the integral operator is defined through the first exponential-integral function and depends on the albedo of the media. The numerical approximation is based on a sequence of piecewise constant projections along the common annihilator of the corresponding local means. In order to produce high precision solutions without solving large scale linear systems, we develop an iterative refinement technique of a low order approximation, For this scheme, parallelization of matrix computations is suitable. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.