Decomposing galaxies with BANG: an automated morpho-kinematical decomposition of the SDSS-DR17 MaNGA survey

TL;DR

This paper introduces BANG, a fast and reliable automated method for decomposing galaxy morpho-kinematics in large surveys, improving understanding of galaxy structure and dynamics.

Contribution

The paper presents BANG, a novel GPU-based analytical approach for galaxy decomposition that integrates morphological and kinematic data, applied to the SDSS-MaNGA survey.

Findings

BANG accurately estimates galaxy parameters for over 10,000 objects.

Results agree with orbit-based algorithms in total stellar mass recovery.

Proper dynamical modelling yields tighter scaling relations.

Abstract

From a purely photometric perspective galaxies are generally decomposed into a bulge+disc system, with bulges being dispersion-dominated and discs rotationally-supported. However, recent observations have demonstrated that such a framework oversimplifies complexity, especially if one considers galaxy kinematics. To address this issue we introduced with the GPU-based code \textsc{bang} a novel approach that employs analytical potential-density pairs as galactic components, allowing for a computationally fast, still reliable fit of the morphological and kinematic properties of galaxies. Here we apply \textsc{bang} to the SDSS-MaNGA survey, estimating key parameters such as mass, radial extensions, and dynamics, for both bulges and discs of +10,000 objects. We test our methodology against a smaller subsample of galaxies independently analysed with an orbit-based algorithm, finding agreement in the recovered total stellar mass. We also manage to reproduce well-established scaling relations, demonstrating how proper dynamical modelling can result in tighter correlations and provide corrections to standard approaches. Finally, we propose a more general way of decomposing galaxies into "hot" and "cold" components, showing a correlation with orbit-based approaches and visually determined morphological type. Unexpected tails in the "hot-to-total" mass-ratio distribution are present for galaxies of all morphologies, possibly due to visual morphology misclassifications.