Dynamical masses of early-type galaxies at z~2

TL;DR

This paper discusses methods to accurately determine the masses and sizes of early-type galaxies at high redshift using galaxy dynamics, specifically stellar velocity dispersion, to overcome limitations of photometry.

Contribution

It reviews recent efforts to measure galaxy dynamical masses at z~2, providing insights into galaxy evolution beyond photometric uncertainties.

Findings

Dynamical mass measurements offer more reliable estimates than photometry.

Galaxy sizes at high redshift can be biased due to imaging quality.

Stellar velocity dispersion is a key parameter for accurate mass determination.

Abstract

The evolution of masses and sizes of passive (early-type) galaxies with redshift provides ideal constraints to galaxy formation models. These parameters can in principle be obtained for large galaxy samples from multi-band photometry alone. However the accuracy of photometric masses is limited by the non-universality of the IMF. Galaxy sizes can be biased at high redshift due to the inferior quality of the imaging data. Both problems can be avoided using galaxy dynamics, and in particular by measuring the galaxies stellar velocity dispersion. Here we provide an overview of the efforts in this direction.