The Tremaine-Weinberg method at high redshifts

¹ Department of Physics, Faculty of Science, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, PO Box 1436, Mashhad, Iran
² Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, Calle Vía Láctea s/n, 38205 La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain
³ Departamento de Astrofísica de la Universidad de La Laguna, Av Astrofisíco Francisco Sánchez s/n, 38205 La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain
⁴ Departamento de Astronomía, Universidad de La Serena, Av. Raúl Bitrán 1305, La Serena, Chile
⁵ International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Hwy, Crawley, WA 6009, Australia
⁶ Centro de Astrobiología, CSIC-INTA, Ctra. de Ajalvir km 4, Torrejón de Ardoz, 28850, Madrid, Spain
⁷ Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia “G. Galilei”, Università di Padova, vicolo dell’Osservatorio 3, 35122 Padova, Italy
⁸ INAF – Osservatorio Astronomico di Padova, Vicolo dell’Osservatorio 5, 35122 Padova, Italy
⁹ Department of Astronomy and Atmospheric Sciences, Kyungpook National University, Daegu 41566, Republic of Korea
¹⁰ Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI), 776 Daedeokdae-ro, Yuseong-gu, Daejeon 34055, Republic of Korea
¹¹ Instituto de Astronomía y Ciencias Planetarias, Universidad de Atacama, Avenida Copayapu 485, 1530000 Copiapó, Atacama, Chile

^★ Corresponding author: mroshan@um.ac.ir

Received: 16 May 2025
Accepted: 24 July 2025

Abstract

This paper examines the reliability of the Tremaine-Weinberg (TW) method in measuring the pattern speed of barred galaxies at high redshifts. Measuring pattern speeds at high redshift may help to shed light on the time evolution of interactions between galactic bars and dark matter halos. The TW method has been extensively employed for nearby galaxies, and its accuracy in determining bar pattern speeds has been validated through numerical simulations. For nearby galaxies, the method yields acceptable results when the inclination angle of the galaxy and the position angle of the bar fall within appropriate ranges. However, the application of the TW method to high-redshift galaxies remains unexplored in both observations and simulations. For this study we generated mock observations of barred galaxies from the TNG50 cosmological simulation. These simulated observations were tailored to mimic the integral field unit (IFU) spectroscopy data that the Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) would capture at a redshift of ɀ ≃ 1.2. By applying the TW method to these mock observations and comparing the results with the known pattern speeds, we demonstrate that the TW method performs adequately for barred galaxies whose bars are sufficiently long to be detected by JWST at high redshifts. This work opens a new avenue for applying the TW method to investigate the properties of high-redshift barred galaxies.