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Testing the robustness of DYNAMITE triaxial Schwarzschild modelling: The effects of correcting the orbit mirroring

Thater, Sabine; Jethwa, Prashin; Tahmasebzadeh, Behzad; Zhu, Ling; den Brok, Mark; Santucci, Giulia; Ding, Yuchen; Poci, Adriano; Lilley, Edward; Tim de Zeeuw, P.; Zocchi, Alice; Maindl, Thomas I.; Rigamonti, Fabio; Yang, Meng; Fahrion, Katja; van de Ven, Glenn

Testing the robustness of DYNAMITE triaxial Schwarzschild modelling: The effects of correcting the orbit mirroring Thumbnail


Authors

Sabine Thater

Prashin Jethwa

Behzad Tahmasebzadeh

Ling Zhu

Mark den Brok

Giulia Santucci

Yuchen Ding

Edward Lilley

P. Tim de Zeeuw

Alice Zocchi

Thomas I. Maindl

Fabio Rigamonti

Meng Yang

Katja Fahrion

Glenn van de Ven



Abstract

In the past 15 yr, the triaxial Schwarzschild orbit-superposition code developed by van den Bosch and van de Ven in Leiden has been widely applied to study the dynamics of galaxies. Recently, a bug was reported in the orbit calculation of this code, specifically in the mirroring procedure that is used to speed up the computation. We have fixed the incorrect mirroring in the DYNAMITE code, which is the publicly-released successor of the Leiden triaxial Schwarzschild code. In this study, we provide a thorough quantification of how this bug has affected the results of dynamical analyses performed with this code. We compare results obtained with the original and corrected versions of DYNAMITE, and discuss the differences in the phase-space distribution of a single orbit and in the global stellar orbit distribution, in the mass estimate of the central black hole in the highly triaxial galaxy PGC 46832, and in the measurement of intrinsic shape and enclosed mass for more than 50 galaxies. Focusing on the typical scientific applications of the Schwarzschild method, in all our tests we find that differences are negligible with respect to the statistical and systematic uncertainties. We conclude that previous results with the Leiden triaxial Schwarzschild code are not significantly affected by the incorrect mirroring.

Citation

Thater, S., Jethwa, P., Tahmasebzadeh, B., Zhu, L., den Brok, M., Santucci, G., …van de Ven, G. (2022). Testing the robustness of DYNAMITE triaxial Schwarzschild modelling: The effects of correcting the orbit mirroring. Astronomy & Astrophysics, 667, Article A51. https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202243926

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Aug 8, 2022
Online Publication Date Nov 3, 2022
Publication Date 2022
Deposit Date Mar 6, 2023
Publicly Available Date Mar 6, 2023
Journal Astronomy & Astrophysics
Print ISSN 0004-6361
Electronic ISSN 1432-0746
Publisher EDP Sciences
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 667
Article Number A51
DOI https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202243926

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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
Open Access article, published by EDP Sciences, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0),
which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
This article is published in open access under the Subscribe-to-Open model. Subscribe to A&A to support open access publication.





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