Constitutive Parameter Estimation from SPARC Rotation Curves
Constitutive Parameter Estimation from SPARC Rotation Curves: A Phenomenological Pilot Study Constitutive Parameter Estimation from SPARC Rotation Curves: A Phenomenological Pilot Study [Your Name] Submitted to: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society | Date: May 2026 ABSTRACT We present a phenomenological pilot study estimating a constitutive shape parameter γ from 148 SPARC galaxies (Lelli et al. 2016) using a repaired numerical solver with soft log-normal regularization. The parameter γ is treated empirically as a flexible descriptor of rotation curve morphology, with no assumed physical interpretation. We find a weak but statistically significant correlation between γ and estimated star formation rate (SFR): Spearman r = 0.25, p = 0.0015 (N = 160). The correlation persists when controlling for stellar mass (partial r ≈ 0.23). An initial pilot signal (N = 21, r = 0.72) was substantially inflated by a hard solver ceiling at γ = 2.0, which ...