NMAGIC made-to-measure particle models of galaxies

Abstract

The parallel code NMAGIC is an implementation of a particle-based method to create made-to-measure models in agreement with observations of galaxies. It works by slowly correcting the particle weights of an evolving N-body system, until a satisfactory compromise is achieved between the goodness of the fit to a given set of observational data, and some degree of smoothness (regularization) of the underlying particle model. We briefly describe the method together with a new regularization scheme in phase-space, which improves recovering the correct orbit structure in the models. We also mention some practical applications showing the power of the technique in investigating the dynamics of galaxies.