Kavli Affiliate: Lina Necib
| First 5 Authors: Micah Oeur, Sarah R. Loebman, Adrian M. Price-Whelan, Arpit Arora, Lina Necib
| Summary:
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.
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