학술논문

A novel approach for calculating galaxy rotation curves using spaxel cross-correlation and iterative smoothing
Document Type
article
Source
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. 514(2)
Subject
Astronomical Sciences
Physical Sciences
methods: data analysis
methods: statistical
Galaxy: kinematics and dynamics
Astronomical and Space Sciences
Astronomy & Astrophysics
Astronomical sciences
Particle and high energy physics
Space sciences
Language
Abstract
ABSTRACT: Precise measurements of the internal dynamics of galaxies have proven of great importance for understanding the internal dark matter distribution of galaxies. We present a novel method for measuring the line-of-sight (LOS) velocities across the face of galaxies by cross-correlation of spectral pixels (spaxels) and an iterative method of smoothing. On simulated data the method can accurately recover the input LOS velocities for different types of spectra (absorption-line dominated, emission-line dominated, and differing shapes of the continuum), and can handle stellar population radial gradients. Most important of all, it continues to provide reliable measurements of LOS velocities with reasonable uncertainties even when the spectra are very low signal-to-noise ratio (approaching ∼1), which is a challenge for traditional template-fitting approaches. We apply our method to data from a real MaNGA galaxy as a demonstration and find promising results with good precision. This novel approach can be complementary to existing methods primarily based on template fitting.