MOKA3D: An innovative approach to 3D gas kinematic modelling. I. Application to AGN ionized outflows

TL;DR

MOKA3D is a new 3D gas kinematic modeling approach that accurately characterizes AGN outflows from integral field spectroscopy, overcoming limitations of previous models by reconstructing the 3D distribution of emitting clouds.

Contribution

This paper introduces MOKA3D, a novel method for modeling 3D gas kinematics that accounts for projection effects and surface brightness without prior assumptions, applied to AGN outflows.

Findings

Successfully applied to three Seyfert-II galaxies.

Describes outflows as conical with constant radial velocity.

Provides detailed estimates of outflow physical properties.

Abstract

Studying the feedback process of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) requires characterising multiple kinematical components, such as rotating gas and stellar disks, outflows, inflows, and jets. To compare the observed properties with theoretical predictions of galaxy evolution and feedback models and to assess the mutual interaction and energy injection rate into the interstellar medium (ISM), one usually relies on simplified kinematic models. These models have several limitations, as they often do not take into account projection effects, beam smearing and the surface brightness distribution of the emitting medium. Here, we present MOKA3D, an innovative approach to model the 3D gas kinematics from integral field spectroscopy observations. In this first paper, we discuss its application to the case of AGN ionised outflows, whose observed clumpy emission and apparently irregular kinematics are only marginally accounted for by existing kinematical models. Unlike previous works, our model does not assume the surface brightness distribution of the gas, but exploits a novel procedure to derive it from the observations by reconstructing the 3D distribution of emitting clouds and providing accurate estimates of the spatially resolved outflow physical properties (e.g. mass rate, kinetic energy). As an example, we demonstrate the capabilities of our method by applying it to three nearby Seyfert-II galaxies observed with MUSE at the VLT and selected from the MAGNUM survey, showing that the complex kinematic features observed can be described by a conical outflow with a constant radial velocity field and a clumpy distribution of clouds.