2018/01/23 by Carl J. Mitchell, J. A. Sellwood, T. B. Williams +3 · 3 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #Astrophysics #Context (archaeology) #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Galaxy #Galaxy formation and evolution #Galaxy rotation curve #Physics #Spiral galaxy #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies #astro-ph.GA
paper · pdf · doi:10.3847/1538-3881/aaabb8
published in The Astronomical Journal 155(3), 123 (Institute of Physics) · Accepted to appear in AJ (28 pages, 22 Figures)
arxiv created 2018/01/23 · openalex created_date 2018/02/02 · openalex publication_date 2018/02/23 · arxiv updated 2018/03/14 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
Abstract The distributions of stars, gas, and dark matter in disk galaxies provide important constraints on galaxy formation models, particularly on small spatial scales (<1 kpc). We have designed the RSS Imaging spectroscopy Nearby Galaxy Survey (RINGS) to target a sample of 19 nearby spiral galaxies. For each of these galaxies, we obtain and model H α and H i 21 cm spectroscopic data as well as multi-band photometric data. We intend to use these models to explore the underlying structure and evolution of these galaxies in a cosmological context, as well as whether the predictions of ΛCDM are consistent with the mass distributions of these galaxies. In this paper, we present spectroscopic imaging data for 14 of the RINGS galaxies observed with the medium spectral resolution Fabry–Pérot etalon on the Southern African Large Telescope. From these observations, we derive high spatial resolution line-of-sight velocity fields of the H α line of excited hydrogen, as well as maps and azimuthally averaged profiles of the integrated H α and [N ii ] emission and oxygen abundances. We then model these kinematic maps with axisymmetric models, from which we extract rotation curves and projection geometries for these galaxies. We show that our derived rotation curves agree well with other determinations, and the similarity of the projection angles with those derived from our photometric images argues against these galaxies having intrinsically oval disks.