POSTER P920: Improving Stellar Dynamic Modeling of Single-Fiber Kinematics

ADASS posters are displayed all week

When

10:20 p.m., Nov. 9, 2023

Theme: Other creative topics in astronomical software

pretalxeposter

Strong galaxy-scale gravitational lenses are invaluable in the study of the evolution of galactic structure, cosmography, and the Hubble tension challenge. The necessary precision of these fields requires comprehensive modeling of the density profile of the lens, in which jointly fitting stellar dynamics and lensing information helps isolate and characterize lens and external mass properties. However, researchers often resort to dynamic fitting of single-aperture kinematics since it is often challenging and observationally expensive to obtain spatially resolved kinematics of lenses that are typically an order of an arcsecond in angular size. Unfortunately, any dynamic fit of single-aperture kinematic measurements requires assumptions on how the unknown stellar orbit patterns impact the line-of-sight measured velocities, which inflates measurement uncertainties and has led to literature reporting bias between isothermal power-law fits of the source images and kinematics. These issues motivated our current work to compare single-aperture dynamic approximations to improved dynamic fits of spatially resolved kinematic measurements for over 10,000 nearby galaxies from the MaNGA survey. We report on the investigation and what modeling improvements are illuminated from this study.

Contacts

Michael Talbot, NASA/JPL