Callum Bloor
Research Mentor(s): Monica Valluri
Mentor Department: Astronomy
Authors: Callum Bloor, Monica Valluri, Shashank Dattathri, Eugene Vasiliev
Session: Session 5 (2:00pm – 2:50pm)
Presentation Type: Poster 71
Abstract
A new method for recovering the properties of bars has been developed and tested using edge-on-orientated n-body representations of barred disk galaxies. We aim to test this method with near-face-on oriented barred disk galaxies. This process involves inferring a 3-dimensional mass distribution from a 2-dimensional surface brightness image. The recovered 3D mass distribution is then used to obtain the gravitational potential of the barred system. We use this gravitational potential to construct orbits of 20,000 stars within the system. Each orbit is superposed with different weights to best-fit the 2D surface brightness image and 2D Integral Field Spectroscopic data. We construct mock data from 20 co-rotated snapshots from an n-body simulation of a barred disk galaxy with a moderately weak bar to test whether increasing signal-to-noise ratio improves supermassive black hole mass recovery. Following these tests, we will apply this method to the barred spiral galaxy, NGC 4151 using data from both Gemini NIFS and SAURON IFU spectrographs.
