Modeling Galaxy Velocity Fields and Inclination Angles (2010)

Undergraduates: Xuan Liu, Yang Cui Mark A. Norris

Faculty Advisor: Sheila Kannappan
Department: Business Administration

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The RESOLVE (REsolved Spectroscopy Of a Local VolumE) Survey will quantify the stellar, gas, and total dynamical mass of every galaxy with baryonic mass >10^9 Msun within a well-defined volume of the local universe. The survey's all-inclusive nature presents substantial challenges for dynamical mass measurement, best addressed by 2D velocity field modeling and statistical analysis. Here we describe a straightforward method to translate observational velocity fields into intrinsic maximal rotation velocities and inclinations. Initially, we build a library of model galaxy velocity fields based on a simple rotating disk model. We then use chi-squared minimization to find the best fit model to our observational data. We present an example implementation of this approach for SparsePak IFU data. We also discuss a method for determining the intrinsic flattening of specific classes of galaxies through the statistical comparison of real data and randomly oriented galaxy models.