The information on halo properties contained in spectroscopic observations of late-type galaxies

TL;DR

This study evaluates how different spectroscopic observations of late-type galaxies influence the precision of dark matter halo property constraints, emphasizing the importance of spectroscopic accuracy for future surveys.

Contribution

It introduces a framework using Kullback-Leibler divergence to quantify information gain on halo parameters from various spectroscopic data types and assesses their relative importance.

Findings

Full rotation curve fits yield 1 to 11 bits of information gain.

Velocity uncertainties significantly impact the constraining power.

Spectroscopic precision is crucial for optimizing dark matter halo measurements.

Abstract

Rotation curves are the key observational manifestation of the dark matter distribution around late-type galaxies. In a halo model context, the precision of constraints on halo parameters is a complex function of the properties of the measurements as well as properties of the galaxy itself. Forthcoming surveys will resolve rotation curves to varying degrees of precision, or measure their integrated effect in the HI linewidth. To ascertain the relative significance of the relevant quantities for constraining halo properties, we study the information on halo mass and concentration as quantified by the Kullback-Leibler divergence of the kinematics-informed posterior from the uninformative prior. We calculate this divergence as a function of the different types of spectroscopic observation, properties of the measurement, galaxy properties and auxiliary observational data on the baryonic components. Using the SPARC sample, we find that fits to the full rotation curve exhibit a large variation in information gain between galaxies, ranging from ~1 to ~11 bits. The variation is predominantly caused by the vast differences in the number of data points and the size of velocity uncertainties between the SPARC galaxies. We also study the relative importance of the minimum HI surface density probed and the size of velocity uncertainties on the constraining power on the inner halo slope, finding the latter to be significantly more important. We spell out the implications of these results for optimising the strategy of galaxy surveys aiming to constrain galaxies' dark matter distributions, highlighting spectroscopic precision as the most important factor.