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Register a new userMass density slope of elliptical galaxies from strong lensing and resolved stellar kinematics
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Natalia Lyskova
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We discuss constraints on the mass density distribution (parameterized as $rhopropto r^{-gamma}$) in early-type galaxies provided by strong lensing and stellar kinematics data. The constraints come from mass measurements at two `pinch radii. One `pinch radius $r_1=2.2 R_{Einst}$ is defined such that the Einstein (i.e. aperture) mass can be converted to the spherical mass almost independently of the mass-model. Another `pinch radius $r_2=R_{opt}$ is chosen so that the dynamical mass, derived from the line-of-sight velocity dispersion, is least sensitive to the anisotropy of stellar orbits. We verified the performance of this approach on a sample of simulated elliptical galaxies and on a sample of 15 SLACS lens galaxies at $0.01 leq z leq 0.35$, which have already been analysed in Barnabe et al. (2011) by the self-consistent joint lensing and kinematic code. For massive simulated galaxies the density slope $gamma$ is recovered with an accuracy of $sim 13%$, unless $r_1$ and $r_2$ happen to be close to each other. For SLACS galaxies, we found good overall agreement with the results of Barnabe et al. (2011) with a sample-averaged slope $gamma=2.1pm0.05$. While the two-pinch-radii approach has larger statistical uncertainties, it is much simpler and uses only few arithmetic operations with directly observable quantities.
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