Rotation Curves of Galactic Disks for Arbitrary Surface Density Profiles: A Simple and Efficient Recipe

Abstract

There is apparently a widespread belief that the gravitational field (and subsequently the rotation curve) ``inside'' razor-thin, axially symmetric disks can not be determined accurately from elliptic integrals because of the singular kernel in the Poisson integral. Here, we report a simple and powerful method to achieve this task numerically using the technique of ``density splitting''.