Schwarzschild modeling of barred galaxies

Abstract

We review the Schwarzschild orbit-superposition approach and present a new implementation of this method, which can deal with a large class of systems, including rotating barred disk galaxies. We discuss two conceptual problems in this field: the intrinsic degeneracy of determining the potential from line-of-sight kinematics, and the non-uniqueness of deprojection and related biases in potential inference, especially acute for triaxial bars. When applied to mock datasets with known 3d shape, our method correctly recovers the pattern speed and other potential parameters. However, more work is needed to systematically address these two problems for real observational datasets.