Synthetic HI observations of a simulated spiral galaxy

TL;DR

This paper presents a method to generate synthetic 21 cm hydrogen line observations from simulated spiral galaxies, enabling direct comparison with real galaxy data and revealing detailed velocity structures.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach combining SPH simulations with radiative transfer to produce realistic synthetic spectral cubes of spiral galaxies.

Findings

Synthetic spectral cubes match observations of M31 and M33.

Velocity kinks indicate non-circular motions in spiral arms.

Galaxies like M31 and M33 lack significant spiral shocks.

Abstract

Using the Torus radiative transfer code we produce synthetic observations of the 21 cm neutral hydrogen line from an SPH simulation of a spiral galaxy. The SPH representation of the galaxy is mapped onto an AMR grid, and a ray tracing method is used to calculate 21 cm line emission for lines of sight through the AMR grid in different velocity channels and spatial pixels. The result is a synthetic spectral cube which can be directly compared to real observations. We compare our synthetic spectral cubes to observations of M31 and M33 and find good agreement, whereby increasing velocity channels trace the main disc of the galaxy. The synthetic data also show kinks in the velocity across the spiral arms, evidence of non-circular velocities. These are still present even when we blur our data to a similar resolution as the observations, but largely absent in M31 and M33, indicating those galaxies do not contain significant spiral shocks. Thus the detailed velocity structure of our maps better represent previous observations of the grand design spiral M81.