How much can we learn from resolved stellar kinematics of galactic haloes using action-based dynamical models?

TL;DR

This study develops and tests axisymmetric, action-based dynamical models to determine how well stellar halo kinematics can constrain galaxy mass profiles and dark matter properties, especially with limited phase-space data.

Contribution

The paper introduces a new method for modeling stellar halo kinematics that accounts for missing phase-space dimensions and systematically evaluates its performance using simulations.

Findings

Models recover total and dark matter mass distributions within confidence intervals.

Limited phase-space data prevents constraining dark matter halo flattening.

Mass profile recovery is robust despite uncertainties in halo shape.

Abstract

Dynamical models are used to study dark matter (DM) in galaxies, how galaxies assemble through mergers, and to test galaxy formation models. Despite its widespread use, there has been no systematic study quantifying how much information can be obtained from just two on-sky positions and line-of-sight velocities, which are typically available for nearby external galaxies. In this work, we introduce axisymmetric, action-based dynamical models that use the positions and velocities of stellar halo stars to jointly constrain the total mass distribution of galaxies and the underlying DM component, as well as the stellar halo phase-space distribution. We rigorously test the method using both idealised equilibrium galaxy mocks and cosmological hydrodynamical simulations from the Auriga suite, systematically assessing how its performance degrades as the available phase-space information is progressively reduced. We further examine the impact of galaxy inclination, modelling assumptions, and methodological systematics on the recovered mass profiles. A crucial development in this work is the improved marginalisation of the model likelihood over missing phase-space dimensions. Our models successfully recover the total and DM mass distributions, as well as the kinematic properties of the stellar tracers, within the derived confidence intervals. However, we find that with limited (3D or 4D) phase-space information, the flattening of the DM halo cannot be constrained with any degree of certainty. Nevertheless, the recovered mass profile is insensitive to the flattening. This finding is independently validated by Schwarzschild modelling tests.