Spatially resolved mock observations of stellar kinematics : full radiative transfer treatment of simulated galaxies

• Published in: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
• Main Authors: Barrientos Acevedo, Daniela, van der Wel, Arjen, Baes, Maarten, Grand, Robert J. J., Kapoor, Anand Utsav, Camps, Peter, de Graaff, Anna, Straatman, Caroline, Bezanson, Rachel
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: 2023
• Subjects: Physics and Astronomy; Astronomy and Astrophysics; radiative transfer; galaxies: kinematics and dynamics; INTEGRAL FIELD SPECTROSCOPY; SAURON PROJECT; ILLUSTRISTNG SIMULATIONS; ANGULAR-MOMENTUM; DISC GALAXIES; TRANSFER CODE; SLOW ROTATORS; DATA RELEASE; DUST; SAMI; sami
• Online Access: https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/01H50SCTY665YPC93ZG5H2K1VP; http://hdl.handle.net/1854/LU-01H50SCTY665YPC93ZG5H2K1VP; https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stad1771; https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/01H50SCTY665YPC93ZG5H2K1VP/file/01H50SGD98S7EMVZ5YQJJ9TF95

We present a framework to build realistic mock spectroscopic observations for state-of-the-art hydrodynamical simulations, using high spectral resolution stellar population models and full radiative transfer treatment with SKIRT. As a first application we generate stellar continuum mock observations for the Auriga cosmological zoom simulations emulating integral-field observations from the SAMI Galaxy survey. We perform spectral fitting on our synthetic cubes and compute the resulting rotation velocity (Vrot) and velocity dispersion within 1Re (σe) for a sub-set of the Auriga sample. We find that the kinematics produced by Auriga are in good agreement with the observations from the SAMI Galaxy survey after taking into account the effects of dust and the systematics produced by the observation limitations. We also explore the effects of seeing convolution, inclination, and attenuation on the line-of-sight velocity distribution. For highly inclined galaxies, these effects can lead to an artificial decrease in the measured V/σ by nearly a factor two (after inclination correction). We also demonstrate the utility of our method for high-redshift galaxies by emulating spatially resolved continuum spectra from the LEGA-C survey and, looking forward, E-ELT HARMONI. Our framework represents a crucial link between the ground truth for stellar populations and kinematics in simulations and the observed stellar continuum observations at low and high redshift.