Related papers: Mass estimators for flattened dispersion-supported…
We compare the performance of mass estimators for elliptical galaxies that rely on the directly observable surface brightness and velocity dispersion profiles, without invoking computationally expensive detailed modeling. These methods…
We derive an accurate mass estimator for dispersion-supported stellar systems and demonstrate its validity by analyzing resolved line-of-sight velocity data for globular clusters, dwarf galaxies, and elliptical galaxies. Specifically, by…
Mass estimators are a key tool to infer the dark matter content in pressure-supported systems like dwarf spheroidal galaxies (dSphs). We construct an estimator for enclosed masses based on the virial theorem which is insensitive to…
The observed stellar kinematics of dispersion-supported galaxies are often used to measure dynamical masses. Recently, several analytical relationships between the stellar line-of-sight velocity dispersion, the projected (2D) or deprojected…
The virial, projected and spherical Jeans equation galaxy mass estimators are compared. High-resolution models of elliptical galaxies from N-body simulations are used to compare predicted mass profiles. Averages over eight models and…
Aims. The predictions of the ellipticity of the dark matter halos from models of structure formation are notoriously difficult to test with observations. A direct measurement would give important constraints on the formation of galaxies,…
We study dynamical models for elliptical galaxies, deriving the projected kinematic profiles in a form that is valid for general surface-brightness profiles and (spherical) total mass profiles, without the need for any explicit…
The halo mass function, encoding the comoving number density of dark matter halos of a given mass, plays a key role in understanding the formation and evolution of galaxies. As such, it is a key goal of current and future deep optical…
By manipulating the spherical Jeans equation, Wolf et al. (2010) show that the mass enclosed within the 3D deprojected half-light radius r_1/2 can be determined with only mild assumptions about the spatial variation of the stellar velocity…
The accuracy and robustness of a simple method to estimate the total mass profile of a galaxy is tested using a sample of 65 cosmological zoom-simulations of individual galaxies. The method only requires information on the optical surface…
We present a spatially resolved comparison of the stellar-mass and total-mass surface distributions of nine early-type galaxies. The galaxies are a subset of the Sloan Lens ACS survey (or SLACS; Bolton et al. 2006). The total-mass…
We use a suite of high-resolution cosmological dwarf galaxy simulations to test the accuracy of commonly-used mass estimators from Walker et al.(2009) and Wolf et al.(2010), both of which depend on the observed line-of-sight velocity…
We use deep r-band photometry and Halpha rotation curves for a sample of 290 late-type spirals to model their mass distribution within the optical radius. We examine luminosity profile decompositions into bulge and disk carefully and…
We propose a new technique to directly measure the shapes of dark matter halos of galaxies using weak gravitational lensing. Extending the standard galaxy-galaxy lensing method, we show that the shape parameters of the mass distribution of…
We introduce the tracer mass estimator. This is a new and simple way to estimate the enclosed mass from the projected positions and line of sight velocities of a tracer population (such as globular clusters, halo stars and planetary…
Starting with the spherical Jeans equation, we show that there exists a radius where the mass enclosed depends only on the projected tangential velocity dispersion, assuming that the anisotropy profile slowly varies. This is…
We estimate the Mass Function of void galaxies in the second public data release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey from a sample of 1000 galaxies with local density contrasts of delta_v < -0.6. The galaxy sample is split into ellipticals and…
We present the recently derived Wolf et al. (2009) mass estimator, which is applicable for spherical pressure-supported stellar systems spanning over ten orders of magnitude in luminosity, as a tool to test galaxy formation theories. We…
We have previously reported the discovery of strong gravitational lensing by faint elliptical galaxies using the WFPC2 on HST and here we investigate their potential usefulness in putting constraints on lens mass models. We compare various…
We discuss constraints on the mass density distribution (parameterized as $\rho\propto r^{-\gamma}$) in early-type galaxies provided by strong lensing and stellar kinematics data. The constraints come from mass measurements at two `pinch'…