A Comparison of Kinematic and Photometric Inclinations in the RESOLVE Survey (2015)

Undergraduates: Ryan Beauchemin, Kathleen Eckert, Kirsten Hall Erik Hoversten

Faculty Advisor: Sheila Kannappan
Department: Physics & Astronomy

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Using standard prescriptions relating axial ratios to inclinations, the inferred distribution of inclinations for galaxies in the REsolved Spectroscopy Of a Local VolumE (RESOLVE) survey departs from theoretical expectations for a complete volume-limited sample. We compare kinematic inclinations from velocity fields of ~200 disk galaxies in RESOLVE with their respective photometric inclinations to examine the origin of this discrepancy. We further investigate which galaxy properties may correlate with differences between inclination estimates, considering morphology, mass, optical size, and rotation curve asymmetry. Our test sample spans galaxy masses between 109 and 1011 M&sun;, axial ratios between 0.2 and 0.9, rotation curve asymmetries between 0% and 30%, and the full range of morphological types, which are representative of the distribution for the parent survey, RESOLVE. However, the test sample does not represent the optically largest or smallest galaxies in RESOLVE, denoted by 90% r-band light radii greater than 70" or less than 6". The kinematic data for our sample galaxies were acquired with our custom image slicer on the SOAR telescope/Goodman spectrograph, and inclinations were measured using DiskFit. This analysis will contribute to the RESOLVE kinematic database in preparation. This research was supported by the National Science Foundation under an REU supplement to CAREER award AST-0955368.