AbstractAs young stars form, they interact with their environment in many ways. We study the radiative interaction of a young star with its surrounding cluster environment. The change in gas temperature caused by a forming star can trigger the formation or inhibit the growth of nearby star forming cores. We calculate the gas temperature around a single star by balancing the dust-gas collisional heating, molecular cooling, and cosmic ray heating rates for a grid of models with various luminosities and density distributions. In the future, this work can be used in large-scale simulations of clustered star formation to study the effect of using a gas temperature which depends not only on density, but also on radiative environment.