Stellar Population Ordering from Galactic Dynamics

We investigate whether information on stellar population distributions can be recovered directly from galactic dynamics. Starting from observed rotation curves, we construct synthetic stellar population mixtures constrained to reproduce the effective mass distribution inferred from the dynamics. Using these reconstructed populations, we compute synthetic ultraviolet and optical colors and compare them to independent photometric observations from GALEX and SDSS. We find statistically significant correlations between predicted and observed color indices across multiple bands, including FUV-NUV, g-r, r-z, and NUV-r. In several cases, rank-rank correlations reach significances well above 5 sigma, indicating that the ordering of stellar populations is robustly encoded in the dynamical information. These results suggest that galactic rotation curves carry non-trivial information about the underlying stellar population structure, beyond their traditional use as mass tracers.