RSAA Colloquia / Seminars / Feast-of-Facts: Thursday, 13 October 2016, 11:00-12:00; Duffield Lecture Theatre


Enrico di Teodoro

"Kinematics of local and high-z galaxies through 3D modelling of emission-line data-cubes"

The study of gas kinematics is a fundamental tool to derive the dynamical properties of disk galaxies. In this context, spectroscopic observations of gas emission-lines have been widely used. The derivation of rotation velocity and gas velocity dispersion is however challenging because these two quantities become degenerate as the spatial resolution of observations decreases (beam smearing). I will present a new approach to derive the kinematics of disk galaxies from emission-line observations. Our method works on 3D datacubes rather than on velocity fields, thus it takes advantage of the full information available in the data and is particularly powerful in disentangling rotation from velocity dispersion. I will compare our 3D technique to traditional 2D/1D methods and show some results on disk galaxies both in the local and in the high-z Universe.