The pitch angle (PA) of arms in spiral galaxies has been found to correlate with a number of important parameters that are normally time intensive and difficult to measure. Accurate… Click to show full abstract
The pitch angle (PA) of arms in spiral galaxies has been found to correlate with a number of important parameters that are normally time intensive and difficult to measure. Accurate PA measurements are therefore important in understanding the underlying physics of disc galaxies. We introduce a semi-automated method that improves upon a parallelized two-dimensional fast Fourier transform algorithm (p2dfft) to estimate PA. Rather than directly inputting deprojected, star subtracted, and galaxy centred images into p2dfft, our method (p2dfft:traced) takes visually traced spiral arms from deprojected galaxy images as input. The tracings do not require extensive expertise to complete. This procedure ignores foreground stars, bulge and/or bar structures, and allows for better discrimination between arm and interarm regions, all of which reduce noise in the results. We compare p2dfft:traced to other manual and automated methods of measuring PA using both simple barred and non-barred spiral galaxy models and a small sample of observed spiral galaxies with different representative morphologies. We find that p2dfft:traced produces results that, in general, are more accurate and precise than the other tested methods and it strikes a balance between total automation and time-consuming manual input to give reliable PA measurements.
               
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