Orbit-Superposition Dynamical Modeling of Barred Galaxies

TL;DR

This paper introduces a modified orbit-superposition Schwarzschild method to explicitly model barred structures in galaxies, accurately recovering bar pattern speeds and internal structures from IFU data.

Contribution

It extends existing dynamical models to include barred features explicitly, enabling detailed analysis of barred galaxy structures and dynamics.

Findings

Successfully recovers bar pattern speed with <10% uncertainty

Accurately decomposes galaxy into bar, bulge, and disk components

Validates method using mock galaxy from N-body simulation

Abstract

Barred structures are important in understanding galaxy evolution, but they were not included explicitly in most dynamical models for nearby galaxies due to their complicated morphological and kinematic properties. We modify the triaxial orbit-superposition Schwarzschild implementation by Van den Bosch et al. (2008) to include barred structures explicitly. The gravitational potential is a combination of a spherical dark matter halo and stellar mass; with the 3D stellar density distribution de-projected from the observed 2D image using a two-component de-projection method, including an axisymmetric disk and a triaxial barred bulge. We consider figure rotation of the galaxy with the bar pattern speed as a free parameter. We validate the method by applying it to a mock galaxy with IFU data created from an N-body simulation with a boxy/peanut or X-shaped bar. Our model fits the observed 2D surface density and all kinematic features well. The bar pattern speed is recovered well with a relative uncertainty smaller than 10%. Based on the internal stellar orbit distribution of the model, we decompose the galaxy into an X-shaped bar, a boxy bulge, a vertically extended structure and a disk, and demonstrate that our model recovers these structures generally well, similar to the true structures in the N-body simulation. Our method provides a realistic way of modelling the bar structure explicitly for nearby barred galaxies with IFU observations.