Speaker
Description
The formation pathways of Compact Stellar Systems (CSSs) remain poorly understood. Some CSSs exhibit signatures of past interactions and mergers, in which tidal stripping is thought to play a key role. These systems often host dynamical structures typically associated with more massive galaxies, such as supermassive black holes (SMBHs), nuclear thin disks, and are preferentially located in dense environments. Other CSSs, however, can be explained through secular evolution or monolithic collapse, showing little evidence for environmental influence. A powerful way to distinguish between these formation scenarios is through the study of internal stellar dynamics.
In this talk, I present the latest results of state-of-the-art Schwarzschild dynamical models of one of the most extensively studied CSSs, the compact elliptical galaxy M32, based on MEGARA@GTC integral-field spectroscopy. These models constrain the triaxial shape of the stellar mass distribution, the mass and scale of the central SMBH, and the properties of the dark matter halo. A key advantage of thoroughly sampling the model parameter space is the ability to analyze the resulting orbital distributions, revealing how different orbit families and dynamical structures are distributed throughout the galaxy.
