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The Planetary Nebula Spectrograph elliptical galaxy survey: the dark matter in NGC 4494

Journal

MONTHLY NOTICES OF THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY
Volume 393, Issue 2, Pages 329-353

Publisher

OXFORD UNIV PRESS
DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2966.2008.14053.x

Keywords

planetary nebulae: general; galaxies: elliptical and lenticular, cD; galaxies: individual: NGC 4494; galaxies: kinematics and dynamics; galaxies: structure; dark matter

Funding

  1. CORDIS within FP6 with aMarie Curie European Reintegration [MERG-FP6-CT-2005-014774]
  2. INAF
  3. National Science Foundation [AST-0507729]
  4. FONDAP Center for Astrophysics CONICYT [15010003]
  5. NASA through Chandra Award [AR5-6012X]
  6. STFC [ST/F00298X/1, PP/C504686/1] Funding Source: UKRI
  7. Science and Technology Facilities Council [ST/F00298X/1, PP/C504686/1] Funding Source: researchfish

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We present new Planetary Nebula Spectrograph observations of the ordinary elliptical galaxy NGC 4494, resulting in positions and velocities of 255 planetary nebulae out to seven effective radii (25 kpc). We also present new wide-field surface photometry from MMT/Megacam, and long-slit stellar kinematics from VLT/FORS2. The spatial and kinematical distributions of the planetary nebulae agree with the field stars in the region of overlap. The mean rotation is relatively low, with a possible kinematic axis twist outside 1R(e). The velocity dispersion profile declines with radius, though not very steeply, down to similar to 70 km s(-1) at the last data point. We have constructed spherical dynamical models of the system, including Jeans analyses with multi-component Lambda cold dark matter (CDM) motivated galaxies as well as logarithmic potentials. These models include special attention to orbital anisotropy, which we constrain using fourth-order velocity moments. Given several different sets of modelling methods and assumptions, we find consistent results for the mass profile within the radial range constrained by the data. Some dark matter (DM) is required by the data; our best-fitting solution has a radially anisotropic stellar halo, a plausible stellar mass-to-light ratio and a DM halo with an unexpectedly low central density. We find that this result does not substantially change with a flattened axisymmetric model. Taken together with other results for galaxy halo masses, we find suggestions for a puzzling pattern wherein most intermediate-luminosity galaxies have very low concentration haloes, while some high-mass ellipticals have very high concentrations.

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