The alignment between the distribution of satellites and the orientation of their central galaxy

By Xiaohu Yang, F. V. D. Bosch, H. Mo, S. Mao, X. Kang, Simone M. Weinmann, Yicheng Guo, Yipeng Jing. 2006

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We use galaxy groups selected from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to examine the alignment between the orientation of the central galaxy (defined as the brightest group member) and the distribution of satellite galaxies. By construction, we therefore only address the alignment on scales smaller than the halo virial radius. We find a highly significant alignment of satellites with the major axis of their central galaxy. This is in qualitative agreement with the recent study of Brainerd, but inconsistent with several previous studies who detected a preferential minor-axis alignment. The alignment strength in our sample is strongest between red central galaxies and red satellites. On the contrary, the satellite distribution in systems with a blue central galaxy is consistent with isotropic. We also find that the alignment strength is stronger in more massive haloes and at smaller projected radii from the central galaxy. In addition, there is a weak indication that fainter (relative to the central galaxy) satellites are more strongly aligned. We present a detailed comparison with previous studies, and discuss the implications of our findings for galaxy formation.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0995ca028f777421583a9ba6092035132a0d948b

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Citations in the corpus

The shape of dark matter haloes in the Aquarius simulations: evolution and memory (2011, background): “…observational studies of external galaxies (e.g. Brainerd 2005, and references therein), in groups (e.g. Binggeli 1982; Kitzbichler & Saurer 2003; Yang et al. 2006; Faltenbacher et al. 2007; God lowski & Flin 2010; Paz et al. 2011) and also numerical simulations (e.g. Knebe et al. 2004;…”
Density profiles of galaxy groups and clusters from SDSS galaxy–galaxy weak lensing (2006, background): “…robustly using bright, red galaxies on large scales (Mandelbaum et al. 2006) and on small scales (Mandelbaum et al. 2005c; Donoso et al. 2006; Yang et al. 2006), with the effect being more controversial for the gen- c© 0000 RAS, MNRAS 000, 000–000 eral galaxy population and for spirals.”
Potential sources of contamination to weak lensing measurements: constraints from N-body simulations (2006, background): “The reality of this scenario is however difficult to quantify, and indeed there is evidence that suggestssatellite galaxies are not randomly oriented with a tendency to align with the major axis of the central galaxy (Brainerd 2005; Yang et al. 2006).”
Galaxy Alignments: Observations and Impact on Cosmology (2015, methodology): “Indeed, the papers that report detections of satellite alignments have been made using isophotal measurements (Pereira & Kuhn 2005; Agustsson & Brainerd 2006; Yang et al. 2006; Faltenbacher et al. 2007) which weight the outskirts of galaxies more strongly than weak lensing-optimised measurements.”