Paper detail

Studying the Kinematics of Faint Stellar Populations with the Planetary Nebula Spectrograph

Galaxies are faint enough when one observes just their light distributions, but in studying their full dynamical structure the stars are spread over the six dimensions of phase space rather than just the three spatial dimensions, making their densities very low indeed. This low signal is unfortunate, as stellar dynamics hold important clues to these systems' life histories, and the issue is compounded by the fact that the most interesting information comes from the faintest outer parts of galaxies, where dynamical timescales (and hence memories of past history) are longest. To extract this information, we have constructed a special-purpose instrument, the Planetary Nebula Spectrograph, which observes planetary nebulae as kinematic tracers of the stellar population, and allows one to study the stellar dynamics of galaxies down to extremely low surface brightnesses. Here, we present results from this instrument that illustrate how it can uncover the nature of low surface-brightness features such as thick disks by studying their kinematics, and trace faint kinematic populations that are photometrically undetectable.