Made-to-measure modeling of observed galaxy dynamics

Understand

Among dynamical modeling techniques, the made-to-measure (M2M) method for modeling steady-state systems is among the most flexible, allowing non-parametric distribution functions in complex gravitational potentials to be modeled efficiently using N-body particles.

• Here we propose and test various improvements to the standard M2M method for modeling observed data, illustrated using the simple setup of a one-dimensional harmonic oscillator.
• We demonstrate that nuisance parameters describing the modeled system's orientation with respect to the observer---e.g., an external galaxy's inclination or the Sun's position in the Milky Way---as well as the parameters of an external gravitational field can be optimized simultaneously with the particle weights.
• We develop a method for sampling from the high-dimensional uncertainty distribution of the particle weights.