As our own galaxy the Milky Way is especially important in our studies. Since we are located inside the Galaxy we can obsereve it much greater detail than any other galaxy, making it the ideal test object for our understanding of the fundamntal properties and behaviours of galaxies in general.
Image Credit: ESO/S. Brunier
Dynamical models are important for our understanding of galaxies, since they allow us to infer importnat information about the gravitational potential, mass ditribution and dark matter content of a galaxy. For our Galaxy there have been many different surveys providing us with a huge data set of stars, however by far the largest survey is Gaia.
In my work we used mainly Gaia data and the Jeans anisotropic method (JAM, Cappellari 2008, 2020) to fit a model for the disk region of our Galaxy. We infer dark matter slope, dark matter density, the circular velocity and the total mass density of the Galaxy.
The results of this work have been published in ApJ Nitschai et al, 2021 and MNRAS Nitschai et al., 2020, see Publication List
Image Credit: Nitschai et al., 2021
The center of the Milky Way is by far the nearest galactic nucleus we can obsereved and in it lies the Sagittarius A complex with the radio source Sgt A*, which is the central black hole. Sourounding Sgr A* is the circumnuclear disk and in the central region inside this disk, lies a 1-1.5 pc radius ionized H II region. This region has a set of orbiting ionized gas streamers, the so called Minispiral.
In my work we use KMOS data (Feldmeier-Krause et al. 2015) that cover the inner 2 pc of the Galaxy and fit orbits to the three main gas streamers using line-of-sight velocity and the flux distribution. With the velocity information and the best-fit orbital parameters we additionally constrain the mass of Sgr A*.
The results of this work have been published in ApJ Nitschai et al., 2020 , see Publication List
Image Credit: Nitschai et al., 2020
