Anisotropy ansatz for the Jeans equations: oblate galaxies

ABSTRACT In the solution of the Jeans equations for axisymmetric galaxy models, the ‘b-ansatz’ is often adopted to prescribe the relation between the vertical and radial components of the velocity dispersion tensor, and close the equations. However, b affects the resulting azimuthal velocity fields quite indirectly, so that the analysis of the model kinematics is usually performed after numerically solving the Jeans equations, a time-consuming approach. In a previous work, we presented a general method to determine the main properties of the kinematical fields resulting in the b-ansatz framework before solving the Jeans equations; results were illustrated by means of disc galaxy models. In this paper, we focus more specifically on realistic ellipsoidal galaxy models. It is found that how and where b affects the galaxy kinematical fields is mainly dependent on the flattening of the stellar density distribution, moderately on the presence of a dark matter halo, and much less on the specific galaxy density profile. The main trends revealed by the numerical exploration, in particular the fact that more flattened systems can support larger b-anisotropy, are explained with the aid of simple ellipsoidal galaxy models, for which most of the analysis can be conducted analytically. The obtained results can be adopted as guidelines for model building and in the interpretation of observational data.