OTI on FIRE: Testing the Efficacy of Orbital Torus Imaging to Recover the Galactic Potential

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Oeur, Micah, Loebman, Sarah R., Price-Whelan, Adrian M., Arora, Arpit, Necib, Lina, Horta, Danny
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866908355588521984
author Oeur, Micah
Loebman, Sarah R.
Price-Whelan, Adrian M.
Arora, Arpit
Necib, Lina
Horta, Danny
author_facet Oeur, Micah
Loebman, Sarah R.
Price-Whelan, Adrian M.
Arora, Arpit
Necib, Lina
Horta, Danny
contents Orbital Torus Imaging (OTI) is a dynamical inference method for determining the Milky Way's gravitational potential using stellar survey data. OTI uses gradients in stellar astrophysical quantities, such as element abundances, as functions of dynamical quantities, like orbital actions or energy, to estimate the Galactic mass distribution, assuming axisymmetry and steady-state of the system. While preliminary applications have shown promising outcomes, its sensitivity to disequilibrium effects is unknown. Here, we apply OTI to a benchmark Feedback in Realistic Environments (FIRE-2) cosmological hydrodynamic simulation, m12i, which enables a comparative analysis between known FIRE-2 vertical acceleration profiles and total surface mass densities to the analogous OTI-inferred results. We quantify OTI's accuracy within solar-analog volumes embedded in the simulated galactic disk. Despite a dynamically-evolving system, we find that OTI recovers the known vertical acceleration profiles within 3 sigma/1 sigma errors for 94%/75% of the volumes considered. We discuss the method's sensitivity to the local, instantaneous structure of the disk, reporting a loss in accuracy for volumes that have large (>1.5 kpc) scale heights and low total density at z=1.1 kpc. We present realistic OTI error bars from both MCMC sampling and bootstrapping the FIRE-2 simulated data, which provides a touchstone for interpreting results obtained from current and forthcoming surveys such as SDSS-V, Gaia, WEAVE, and 4MOST.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_05590
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle OTI on FIRE: Testing the Efficacy of Orbital Torus Imaging to Recover the Galactic Potential
Oeur, Micah
Loebman, Sarah R.
Price-Whelan, Adrian M.
Arora, Arpit
Necib, Lina
Horta, Danny
Astrophysics of Galaxies
Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
Solar and Stellar Astrophysics
Orbital Torus Imaging (OTI) is a dynamical inference method for determining the Milky Way's gravitational potential using stellar survey data. OTI uses gradients in stellar astrophysical quantities, such as element abundances, as functions of dynamical quantities, like orbital actions or energy, to estimate the Galactic mass distribution, assuming axisymmetry and steady-state of the system. While preliminary applications have shown promising outcomes, its sensitivity to disequilibrium effects is unknown. Here, we apply OTI to a benchmark Feedback in Realistic Environments (FIRE-2) cosmological hydrodynamic simulation, m12i, which enables a comparative analysis between known FIRE-2 vertical acceleration profiles and total surface mass densities to the analogous OTI-inferred results. We quantify OTI's accuracy within solar-analog volumes embedded in the simulated galactic disk. Despite a dynamically-evolving system, we find that OTI recovers the known vertical acceleration profiles within 3 sigma/1 sigma errors for 94%/75% of the volumes considered. We discuss the method's sensitivity to the local, instantaneous structure of the disk, reporting a loss in accuracy for volumes that have large (>1.5 kpc) scale heights and low total density at z=1.1 kpc. We present realistic OTI error bars from both MCMC sampling and bootstrapping the FIRE-2 simulated data, which provides a touchstone for interpreting results obtained from current and forthcoming surveys such as SDSS-V, Gaia, WEAVE, and 4MOST.
title OTI on FIRE: Testing the Efficacy of Orbital Torus Imaging to Recover the Galactic Potential
topic Astrophysics of Galaxies
Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
Solar and Stellar Astrophysics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.05590