Extracting Galaxy Rotation Curves for a Dark Matter Census and Exploring Kinematic Anomalies (2013)
Undergraduates: Kirsten Hall, Ashely Baker Kathleen Eckert, David Stark, Amanda Moffett Erik Hoversten, Mark Norris, the RESOLVE Team
Faculty Advisor: Sheila Kannappan
Department: Physics & Astronomy
We are extracting galaxy rotation curves to obtain a dark matter census of the galaxies in the RESOLVE (REsolved Spectroscopy Of a Local VolumE) survey, and to identify galactic kinematic anomalies. RESOLVE is a volume-limited survey that covers more than 50,000 cubic Mpc of the nearby universe, and is composed of approximately 1600 galaxies. Using the SOAR and SALT telescopes, we are obtaining optical velocity fields of each galaxy in order to determine the 3-dimensional dynamical mass distribution in the survey volume. We compare results from the optical kinematic data with radio data from ALFALFA and supplementary GBT and Arecibo observations in order to identify and analyze any discrepancies. In addition, by extracting optical rotation curves we identify galaxies that exhibit anomalous kinematics for further investigation.