Deprojecting Sersic Profiles for Arbitrary Triaxial Shapes: Robust Measures of Intrinsic and Projected Galaxy Sizes

TL;DR

This paper develops an analytical method to convert projected Sersic light profiles into three-dimensional distributions for triaxial galaxies, introducing a robust size measure, $r_{med}$, and practical proxies for observational data.

Contribution

It introduces a new, robust intrinsic galaxy size measure, $r_{med}$, and provides practical proxies for projected sizes, accounting for triaxial shapes and inclinations.

Findings

$r_{med}$ is nearly independent of Sersic index and axis ratios.

Projected semi-major axis length of 50% light ellipse is an unbiased proxy for $r_{med}$ with ~10% scatter.

For populations with unknown triaxiality, $1.3 imes R_e$ estimates $r_{med}$ with 20-30% scatter.

Abstract

We present the analytical framework for converting projected light distributions with a S\'ersic profile into three-dimensional light distributions for stellar systems of arbitrary triaxial shape. The main practical result is the definition of a simple yet robust measure of intrinsic galaxy size: the median radius $r_\mathrm{med}$, defined as the radius of a sphere that contains 50% of the total luminosity or mass, that is, the median distance of a star to the galaxy center. We examine how $r_\mathrm{med}$ depends on projected size measurements as a function of S\'ersic index and intrinsic axis ratios, and demonstrate its relative independence of these parameters. As an application we show that the projected semi-major axis length of the ellipse enclosing 50% of the light is an unbiased proxy for $r_\mathrm{med}$, with small galaxy-to-galaxy scatter of $\sim$10% (1$\sigma$), under the condition that the variation in triaxiality within the population is small. For galaxy populations with unknown or a large range in triaxiality an unbiased proxy for $r_\mathrm{med}$ is $1.3\times R_{e}$, where $R_{e}$ is the circularized half-light radius, with galaxy-to-galaxy scatter of 20-30% (1$\sigma$). We also describe how inclinations can be estimated for individual galaxies based on the measured projected shape and prior knowledge of the intrinsic shape distribution of the corresponding galaxy population. We make the numerical implementation of our calculations available.