11-06, 08:30– (US/Arizona), Posters
Strong galaxy-scale gravitational lenses are invaluable in the study of the evolution of galactic structure, cosmography, and the Hubble tension challenge. The necessary precision of these fields requires comprehensive modeling of the density profile of the lens, in which jointly fitting stellar dynamics and lensing information helps isolate and characterize lens and external mass properties. However, researchers often resort to dynamic fitting of single-aperture kinematics since it is often challenging and observationally expensive to obtain spatially resolved kinematics of lenses that are typically an order of an arcsecond in angular size. Unfortunately, any dynamic fit of single-aperture kinematic measurements requires assumptions on how the unknown stellar orbit patterns impact the line-of-sight measured velocities, which inflates measurement uncertainties and has led to literature reporting bias between isothermal power-law fits of the source images and kinematics. These issues motivated our current work to compare single-aperture dynamic approximations to improved dynamic fits of spatially resolved kinematic measurements for over 10,000 nearby galaxies from the MaNGA survey. We report on the investigation and what modeling improvements are illuminated from this study.
I have always loved research in galaxies and larger-scale objects. I pursued stargazing and astrophotography in my early life. I received an Associate of Science from Dixie State University (2009), where I worked under a NASA undergraduate grant to relate solar cycles to satellite observations of oxygen and temperature variations within the ionosphere. I received a Bachelor in Physics Astronomy from Northern Arizona University (2012), where I worked under a NASA undergraduate grant to map ancient Mars environments inferred from 10,000 crater morphologies I cataloged. I received a Ph.D. and Master in Physics from the University of Utah (2021 ), where I spectroscopically detected -1,600 strong galaxy-scale gravitational lens candidates in preparation to study how galaxies form and evolve.