Schwarzschild modeling of barred galaxies

TL;DR

This paper reviews and introduces a new Schwarzschild orbit-superposition method capable of modeling rotating barred galaxies, addressing key challenges in potential inference and demonstrating accurate recovery of galaxy parameters from mock data.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel implementation of Schwarzschild modeling that handles barred galaxy systems and discusses solutions to potential degeneracy and non-uniqueness issues.

Findings

Accurately recovers pattern speed and potential parameters from mock datasets.

Identifies key challenges in potential inference for barred galaxies.

Highlights need for further work with real observational data.

Abstract

We review the Schwarzschild orbit-superposition approach and present a new implementation of this method, which can deal with a large class of systems, including rotating barred disk galaxies. We discuss two conceptuals problems in this field: the intrinsic degeneracy of determining the potential from line-of-sight kinematics, and the non-uniqueness of deprojection and related biases in potential inference, especially acute for triaxial bars. When applied to mock datasets with known 3d shape, our method correctly recovers the pattern speed and other potential parameters. However, more work is needed to systematically address these two problems for real observational datasets.