Forward modeling of internal kinematic structures of disk galaxies in MaNGA

SDSS-IV MaNGA is a large IFU survey with a goal of observing ~ 104 galaxies by the survey’s end. MaNGA produces spatially resolved kinematic maps that describe the motions of stars and gas in each galaxy, but these maps include the effects of beam smearing. The primary objective of this project is the development, testing and validation of a code designed to accurately extract intrinsic kinematic models from spectroscopic measurements of disk galaxies observed by the MaNGA survey. The code uses a thin disk model including perturbations around circular orbits up to second order to describe bar, spiral and oval features. In this Thesis, we document our implementation of the algorithm and present a small sample of our results to demonstrate the behavior of our code. The code is available online at http://github.com/aleung12/manga/ under the MIT License.