ASIAA Summer Students Program
ASIAA Summer Student Program 2023
July 3 - August 31

2023 Project Description

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Whats the origin of non-circular rotation in spiral galaxies ?
This project can be carried out remotely.

Keywords:
Galaxies
IFS
Kinematics
MUSE

Supervisors

Carlos Lopez-Coba
Find out more about supervisors on ASIAA website

Task Description and Goals

Unlike Ellipticals, spiral galaxies, or disk galaxies in general, are supported by rotation. The rotation of gas and stars on the disk is governed by the total gravitational potential. It is often assumed that particles follow circular orbits around a fixed kinematic centre, without any contribution of non-circular motions. However, non-axisymmetric components of galaxies such as spiral arms, stellar bars, bulges, etc, induce deviation of the circular rotation that can be traced from the observed velocity field of gas. This project tries to unravel the non-circular motions of galaxies using high-resolution data from the MUSE spectrograph. This project aims to quantify the circular and non-circular rotation of spiral galaxies through the use of the XookSuut package. This python tool implements Bayesian statistics to recover the non-circular motions from velocity maps of galaxies. At the end of the project, the student will be able to identify the rotational curve and the non-circular rotation of their objects. In addition, the student will interpret the rotation patterns of the non-circular motions and conclude which is the most likely source of these motions, that is either stellar bars, the spiral arms or another.

Required Background

Basic-Intermediate domain of the Python language; general knowledge of extragalactic astronomy; desired: handling of fits files.

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