English

Schwarzschild dynamical model of the Fornax dwarf spheroidal galaxy

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2018-11-28 v2

Abstract

We present a full dynamical model of the Fornax dwarf spheroidal galaxy obtained with the spherically symmetric Schwarzschild orbit superposition method applied to the largest kinematic data set presently available. We modelled the total mass content of the dwarf with the mass-to-light ratio Υ\Upsilon varying with radius and found that Fornax is with high probability embedded in a massive and extended dark matter halo. We estimated the total mass contained within 1\,kpc to be M(<1M(<1\,kpc)=1.250.13+0.06×108)=1.25^{+0.06}_{-0.13} \times 10^8\,M_{\odot}. The data are consistent with the constant mass-to-light ratio, i.e. the mass-follows-light model, only at 3σ\sigma level, but still require a high value of Υ11.2\Upsilon \approx 11.2\,M/_{\odot}/L_{\odot}. Our results are in general agreement with previous estimates of the dynamical mass profile of Fornax. As the Schwarzschild method does not require any assumptions on the orbital anisotropy of the stars, we obtained a profile of the anisotropy parameter β\beta as an output of our modelling. The derived anisotropy is close to zero in the centre of the galaxy and decreases with radius, but remains consistent with isotropic orbits at all radii at 1σ\sigma confidence level.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1807.07852,
  title  = {Schwarzschild dynamical model of the Fornax dwarf spheroidal galaxy},
  author = {Klaudia Kowalczyk and Andrés del Pino and Ewa L. Lokas and Monica Valluri},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1807.07852},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

11 pages, 9 figures, 3 tables, accepted for publication in MNRAS