Schwarzschild dynamical model of the Fornax dwarf spheroidal galaxy
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 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 1kpc to be kpcM. The data are consistent with the constant mass-to-light ratio, i.e. the mass-follows-light model, only at 3 level, but still require a high value of ML. 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 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 1 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