Schedule Feb 17, 2012
Discrete Dynamical Modelling of Local Group Stellar Systems
Laura Watkins (MPIA Heidelberg)

Dynamical modelling of nearby galaxies with unresolved IFU data has been carried out very successfully and makes excellent use of the data available. The same cannot be said for objects in the Local Group; we are in the fortunate position of having discrete, resolved datasets - often of both high quality and high quantity - yet the dynamical modelling techniques employed typically degrade the data by spatially binning, are often overly simplified, and make assumptions that are not always (astro)physically justified.

A better approach would be to develop discrete dynamical modelling tools that fully exploit the resolved nature of the data. Such modelling will allow outliers to be identified and removed; with a better handle on membership, the models can then be refined. Furthermore, the outliers themselves may be of interest as they could be members of another population, perhaps a stream or other tidal feature.

With such methods, we hope to better constrain the dark matter content of dwarf galaxies and address the question of the presence of intermediate-mass black holes and dark matter in globular clusters. These methods can also be applied to datasets within the Milky Way; for example, we plan to use these techniques with solar neighbourhood data in order to determine the dark matter content near the Sun.

The work I will describe in my poster is some of the steps we have taken towards this goal. This includes the application to the globular cluster Omega Centauri, which is a calibration object for HST/WFC3 and, as such, has a wealth of high-quality data available.


View poster as pdf.

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