Deprojection and stellar dynamical modelling of boxy/peanut bars in edge-on discs

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new method for reconstructing the 3D structure of boxy/peanut-shaped bars in edge-on galaxies from 2D images, enabling accurate modeling of their gravitational potential and key dynamical parameters.

Contribution

The authors develop and validate a novel parametric 3D density modeling approach for BP/X bars in edge-on galaxies, compatible with existing image fitting software and capable of recovering multiple dynamical properties.

Findings

Achieves <5% accuracy in gravitational potential estimation.

Recovers bar orientation, pattern speed, and stellar mass-to-light ratio with high precision.

First method to accurately determine bar orientation and pattern speed in edge-on discs.

Abstract

We present a new method to infer the 3D dimensional luminosity distributions of edge-on barred galaxies with boxy-peanut/X (BP/X) shaped structures from their 2D surface brightness distributions. Our method relies on forward modeling of newly introduced parametric 3D density distributions for the BP/X bar, disc and other components using an existing image fitting software package (IMFIT). We validate our method using an N-body simulation of a barred disc galaxy with a moderately strong BP/X shape. For fixed orientation angles the derived 3D BP/X shaped density distribution is shown to yield a gravitational potential that is accurate to at least 5% and forces that are accurate to at least 15%, with average errors being ~1.5% for both. When additional quantities of interest, such as the orientation of the bar to the line-of-sight, its pattern speed, and the stellar mass-to-light ratio are unknown they can be recovered to high accuracy by providing the parametric density distribution to the Schwarzschild modelling code FORSTAND. We also explore the ability of our models to recover the mass of the central supermassive black hole. This method is the first to be able to accurately recover both the orientation of the bar to the line-of-sight and its pattern speed even when the disc is perfectly edge-on.