Abstract:
Internal kinematics of galaxies, traced through the stellar
rotation curve or two dimensional velocity map, carry
important information on galactic structure and dark
matter. With upcoming surveys, the velocity map may play
a key role in the development of kinematic lensing as an
astrophysical probe. We improve techniques for extracting
velocity information from integral field spectroscopy at
low signal-to-noise (S/N), without a template, and demonstrate substantial
advantages over the standard Penalized PiXel-Fitting method (pPXF) approach. Robust
rotation curves can be derived down to S/N ≈ 2 using our method.