The Spin Alignment of Galaxies with the Large-scale Tidal Field in Hydrodynamic Simulations
Abstract
The correlation between the spins of dark matter halos and the large-scale structure (LSS) has been studied in great detail over a large redshift range, while investigations of galaxies are still incomplete. Motivated by this point, we use the state-of-the-art hydrodynamic simulation, Illustris-1, to investigate mainly the spin-LSS correlation of galaxies at a redshift of z = 0. We mainly find that the spins of low-mass, blue, oblate galaxies are preferentially aligned with the slowest collapsing direction ({{\boldsymbol{e}}}3) of the large-scale tidal field, while massive, red, prolate galaxy spins tend to be perpendicular to {{\boldsymbol{e}}}3. The transition from a parallel to a perpendicular trend occurs at ∼109.4 h -1 M ⊙ in the stellar mass, ∼0.62 in the g-r color, and ∼0.4 in triaxiality. The transition stellar mass decreases with increasing redshifts. The alignment was found to be primarily correlated with the galaxy stellar mass. Our results are consistent with previous studies both in N-body simulations and observations. Our study also fills the vacancy in the study of the galaxy spin-LSS correlation at z = 0 using hydrodynamical simulations and also provides important insight to understand the formation and evolution of galaxy angular momentum.
- Publication:
-
The Astrophysical Journal
- Pub Date:
- October 2018
- DOI:
- 10.3847/1538-4357/aae20f
- arXiv:
- arXiv:1810.04581
- Bibcode:
- 2018ApJ...866..138W
- Keywords:
-
- galaxies: evolution;
- galaxies: general;
- large-scale structure of universe;
- methods: observational;
- methods: statistical;
- Astrophysics - Astrophysics of Galaxies;
- Astrophysics - Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics
- E-Print:
- 9 pages, 6 figures, 1 table. Accepted for publication in ApJ, match the proof version