Modeling biases from constant stellar mass-to-light ratio assumption in galaxy dynamics and strong lensing
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2023
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| _version_ | 1866917860216930304 |
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| author | Liang, Yan Xu, Dandan Sluse, Dominique Sonnenfeld, Alessandro Shu, Yiping |
| author_facet | Liang, Yan Xu, Dandan Sluse, Dominique Sonnenfeld, Alessandro Shu, Yiping |
| contents | A constant stellar mass-to-light ratio $M_\star/L$ has been widely-used in studies of galaxy dynamics and strong lensing, which aim at disentangling the mass distributions of dark matter and baryons. However, systematic biases arising from constant $M_\star/L$ assumption have not been fully quantified. In this work, we take massive early-type galaxies from the TNG100 simulation to investigate possible systematic biases in the inferences due to a constant $M_\star/L$ assumption. We construct two-component matter density models, where one component describes the dark matter, the other for the stars, which is made to follow the light profile by assuming a constant $M_\star/L$. We fit the two-component model directly to the {\it total} matter density distributions of simulated galaxies to eliminate systematics coming from other model assumptions. We find that galaxies generally have more centrally-concentrated stellar mass profile than their light distribution. Given the light profiles adopted (i.e., single- and double-S{é}rsic profiles), the assumption of a constant $M_\star/L$ would artificially break the model degeneracy between baryons and dark matter {\it for non-constant} $M_\star/L$ systems. For such systems, without knowing the true $M_{\star}/L$ but assuming a constant ratio, the two-component modeling procedure tend to generally overestimate $M_{\star}/L$ by $30\%-50\%$, and underestimate the central dark matter fraction $f_{\rm DM}$ by $\sim 20\%$ on average. |
| format | Preprint |
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arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2311_07442 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2023 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Modeling biases from constant stellar mass-to-light ratio assumption in galaxy dynamics and strong lensing Liang, Yan Xu, Dandan Sluse, Dominique Sonnenfeld, Alessandro Shu, Yiping Astrophysics of Galaxies A constant stellar mass-to-light ratio $M_\star/L$ has been widely-used in studies of galaxy dynamics and strong lensing, which aim at disentangling the mass distributions of dark matter and baryons. However, systematic biases arising from constant $M_\star/L$ assumption have not been fully quantified. In this work, we take massive early-type galaxies from the TNG100 simulation to investigate possible systematic biases in the inferences due to a constant $M_\star/L$ assumption. We construct two-component matter density models, where one component describes the dark matter, the other for the stars, which is made to follow the light profile by assuming a constant $M_\star/L$. We fit the two-component model directly to the {\it total} matter density distributions of simulated galaxies to eliminate systematics coming from other model assumptions. We find that galaxies generally have more centrally-concentrated stellar mass profile than their light distribution. Given the light profiles adopted (i.e., single- and double-S{é}rsic profiles), the assumption of a constant $M_\star/L$ would artificially break the model degeneracy between baryons and dark matter {\it for non-constant} $M_\star/L$ systems. For such systems, without knowing the true $M_{\star}/L$ but assuming a constant ratio, the two-component modeling procedure tend to generally overestimate $M_{\star}/L$ by $30\%-50\%$, and underestimate the central dark matter fraction $f_{\rm DM}$ by $\sim 20\%$ on average. |
| title | Modeling biases from constant stellar mass-to-light ratio assumption in galaxy dynamics and strong lensing |
| topic | Astrophysics of Galaxies |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.07442 |