Related papers: Measuring the mass distribution in stellar systems
If a dynamical system is long-lived and non-resonant (that is, if there is a set of tracers that have evolved independently through many orbital times), and if the system is observed at any non-special time, it is possible to infer the…
We present an innovative approach to the methodology of dynamical modelling, allowing practical reconstruction of the underlying dark matter mass without assuming both the density and anisotropy functions. With this, the mass-anisotropy…
Thanks to instrumental advances, new, very large kinematic datasets for nearby dwarf spheroidal (dSph) galaxies are on the horizon. A key aim of these datasets is to help determine the distribution of dark matter in these galaxies. Past…
The determination of chemical abundances from stellar spectra is considered a mature field of astrophysics. Digital spectra of stars are recorded and processed with standard techniques, much like samples in the biological sciences.…
(ABRIDGED) We present a new Schwarzschild orbit-superposition code designed to model discrete datasets composed of velocities of individual kinematic tracers in a dynamical system. This constitutes an extension of previous implementations…
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…
In the final stages of stellar evolution low- to intermediate-mass stars lose their envelope in increasingly massive stellar winds. Such winds affect the interstellar medium and the galactic chemical evolution as well as the circumstellar…
The purpose of this letter is to compare the quality of different methods for estimating stellar masses of galaxies. We compare the results of (a) fitting stellar population synthesis models to broad band colors from SDSS and 2MASS, (b) the…
The rate at which massive stars eject mass in stellar winds significantly influences their evolutionary path. Cosmic rates of nucleosynthesis, explosive stellar phenomena, and compact object genesis depend on this poorly known facet of…
Using a sample of 126000 late-type galaxies from the SDSS, we analyzed stellar mass as a function of the dynamical mass. Stellar masses are estimated using eight stellar population synthesis (SPS) models with constant IMF, while dynamical…
Schwarzschild's orbit-superposition technique is the most developed and well-tested method available for constraining the detailed mass distributions of equilibrium stellar systems. Here I provide a very short overview of the method and its…
A method is presented for finding anisotropic distribution functions for stellar systems with known, spherically symmetric, densities, which depends only on the two classical integrals of the energy and the magnitude of the angular…
Gravitational wave observations of binary neutron star mergers provide valuable information about neutron star structure and the equation of state of dense nuclear matter. Numerous methods have been proposed to analyze the population of…
We discuss the uncertainties and the systematic effects that exist in the estimates of the stellar masses of high redshift galaxies, using broad band photometry, and how they affect the deduced galaxy stellar mass function. We use at this…
There has been a long-standing factor-of-two tension between the observed star formation rate density and the observed stellar mass buildup after $z\sim2$. Recently we have proposed that sophisticated panchromatic SED models can resolve…
Context. The "mass discrepancy" in massive O stars represents a long-standing problem in stellar astrophysics with far-reaching implications for the chemical and dynamical feedback in galaxies. Aims. Our goal is to investigate this mass…
Mass is the most important stellar parameter, but it is not directly observable for a single star. Spherical model stellar atmospheres are explicitly characterized by their luminosity ($L_\star$), mass ($M_\star$) and radius ($R_\star$),…
The masses of stars and planets can be measured dynamically in binary systems. For an unresolved binary, time series astrometry yields some orbital parameters, but it cannot provide the component masses, because we observe only the motion…
The general idea of determining cosmological parameters with gravitational lensing statistics is outlined, and then recent work---with an emphasis on applicability to all cosmological models, observational bias, better statistics and…
Galaxy spectra are a rich source of kinematical information since the shapes of the absorption lines reflect the movement of stars along the line-of-sight. We present a technique to directly build a dynamical model for a galaxy by fitting…