Related papers: Two-integral Schwarzschild models
In this Letter, we investigate the claim of Valluri et al. (2003), namely that the use of Schwarzschild dynamical (orbit-based) models leads to an indeterminacy regarding the estimation of the free parameters like the central black hole…
Evidence for the majority of the supermassive black holes in the local universe has been obtained dynamically from stellar motions with the Schwarzschild orbit superposition method. However, there have been only a handful of studies using…
We have developed a spherically symmetric dynamical model of a dwarf spheroidal galaxy using the Schwarzschild method. This type of modelling yields constraints both on the total mass distribution (e.g. enclosed mass and scale radius) as…
Galactic nuclei, the densest stellar environments in the Universe, exhibit a complex geometrical structure. The stars orbiting the central supermassive black hole follow a mass segregated distribution both in the radial distance from the…
We model mock observations of collisionless N-body disc-disc mergers with an axisymmetric orbit superposition program that has been used to model Coma ellipticals. The remnants sample representatively the shapes of disc-disc mergers…
We take a sample of 24 elliptical and lenticular galaxies previously analysed by the SAURON project using three-integral dynamical models created with Schwarzschild's method, and re-analyse them using the made-to-measure (M2M) method of…
Luminous galaxies and their dark halos are likely to have triaxial shapes. The construction of distribution functions for triaxial systems is a hard problem, due to the existence of only one exact integral of motion, the energy $E$. Even…
Orbit superposition models are a non-parametric dynamical modelling technique to determine the mass of a galaxy's central supermassive black hole (SMBH), its stars, or its dark-matter halo. One of the main problems is how to decide which…
We present new analytical distribution functions for anisotropic spherical galaxies. They have the density profiles of the gamma-models, which allow a wide range of central density slopes, and are widely used to fit elliptical galaxies and…
Gravitational lensing and stellar dynamics are two independent methods, based solely on gravity, to study the mass distributions of galaxies. Both methods suffer from degeneracies, however, that are difficult to break. In this paper, we…
We numerically investigate the motion of stars on the meridional plane of an axially symmetric disk galaxy model, containing a central supermassive black hole, represented by the Paczynski-Wiita potential. By using this pseudo-Newtonian…
Intrinsic galaxy alignments yield an important contribution to the observed statistics of galaxy shapes. The general bias expansion for galaxy sizes and shapes in three dimensions has been recently described by Vlah, Chisari \& Schmidt…
We present the derivation of distribution functions for the first four members of a family of disks, previously obtained in (MNRAS, 371, 1873, 2006), which represent a family of axially symmetric galaxy models with finite radius and well…
In the context of the study of the properties of the mutual mass distribution of the bright and dark matter in elliptical galaxies, present a family of two-component, spherical, self-consistent galaxy models, where one density distribution…
We present a method for fitting orbit-superposition models to the kinematics of discrete stellar systems when the available stellar sample has been filtered by a known selection function. The fitting method can be applied to any model in…
We describe a method for parameterizing two-integral distribution functions, based on triangular tesselations of the integral plane. We apply the method to the axisymmetric isotropic rotator model for the Galactic bulge of Kent~(1992), and…
We investigate the accuracy and precision of triaxial dynamical orbit models by fitting two dimensional mock observations of a realistic N-body merger simulation resembling a massive early-type galaxy with a supermassive black hole (SMBH).…
Two distinct non-singular interior models that describe anisotropic spherical configurations are presented in this work. We develop the Einstein field equations and the associated mass function in accordance with a static spherical…
We demonstrate that the nuclei of galaxies containing supermassive black holes can be triaxial in shape. Schwarzschild's method was first used to construct self-consistent orbital superpositions representing nuclei with axis ratios of…
We present Forstand, a new code for constructing dynamical models of galaxies with the Schwarzschild orbit-superposition method. These models are constrained by line-of-sight kinematic observations and applicable to galaxies of all…