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A widely employed method for estimating the mass of stellar systems with apparent spherical symmetry is dynamical modelling using the spherically symmetric Jeans equation. Unfortunately, this approach suffers from a degeneracy between the assumed mass density and the second-order velocity moments. This degeneracy can lead to significantly different predictions for the mass content of the system under investigation, and thus poses a barrier for accurate estimates of the dark matter content of astrophysical systems. In a series of papers, we describe an algorithm that removes this degeneracy and allows for unbiased mass estimates of systems of constant or variable mass-to-light ratio. The present contribution sets the theoretical foundation of the method that reconstructs a unique kinematic profile for some assumed free functional form of the mass density. The essence of our method lies in using flexible B-spline functions for the representation of the radial velocity dispersion in the spherically symmetric Jeans equation. We demonstrate our algorithm through an application to synthetic data for the case of an isotropic King model with fixed mass-to-light ratio, recovering excellent fits of theoretical functions to observables and a unique solution. The mass–anisotropy degeneracy is removed to the extent that, for an assumed functional form of the potential and mass density pair (Φ, ρ), and a given set of line-of-sight velocity dispersion | ₋₎ₒ²| observables, we recover a unique profile for | ₑₑ²| and | ₓₓ²|. Our algorithm is simple, easy to apply and provides an efficient means to reconstruct the kinematic profile.
Diakogiannis et al. (Mon,) studied this question.