Abstract

A minimum in stellar velocity dispersion is often observed in the central regions of disc galaxies. To investigate the origin of this feature, known as a sigma- drop, we analyse the stellar kinematics of a high- resolution N- body + smooth particle hydrodynamical simulation, which models the secular evolution of an unbarred disc galaxy. We compared the intrinsic massweighted kinematics to the recovered luminosity- weighted ones. The latter were obtained by analysing synthetic spectra produced by a new code, SYNTRA, that generates synthetic spectra by assigning a stellar population synthesis model to each star particle based on its age and metallicity. The kinematics were derived from the synthetic spectra as in real spectra to mimic the kinematic analysis of real galaxies. We found that the recovered luminosity- weighted kinematics in the centre of the simulated galaxy are biased to higher rotation velocities and lower velocity dispersions due to the presence of young stars in a thin and kinematically cool disc, and are ultimately responsible for the s- drop. Our procedure for building mock observations and thus recovering the luminosity- weighted kinematics of the stars in a galaxy simulation is a powerful tool that can be applied to a variety of scientific questions, such as multiple stellar populations in kinematically decoupled cores and counter- rotating components, and galaxies with both thick and thin disc components.