Evidence for spin alignment of spiral and elliptical/S0 galaxies in filaments

By Elmo Tempel, Radu S. Stoica, Enn Saar. 2012

141 citations recorded by the source corpus.

ABSTRACT Galaxies are not distributed randomly in the cosmic web but are instead arranged inﬁlaments and sheets surrounding cosmic voids. Observationally there is still no con-vincing evidence of a link between the properties of galaxies and their host structures.However, by the tidal torque theory (our understanding of the origin of galaxy angularmomentum), such a link should exist. Using the presently largest spectroscopic galaxyredshift survey (SDSS) we study the connection between the spin axes of galaxies andthe orientation of their host ﬁlaments.We use a three dimensional ﬁeld of orientations to describe cosmic ﬁlaments. Torestore the inclination angles of galaxies, we use a 3D photometric model of galaxiesthat gives these angles more accurately than traditional 2D models.We found evidence thatthe spin axesofbrightspiralgalaxieshavea weaktendencyto be aligned parallel to ﬁlaments. For elliptical/S0 galaxies, we have a statisticallysigniﬁcant result that their spin axes are aligned preferentially perpendicular to thehost ﬁlaments; we show that this signal practically does not depend on the accuracyof the estimated inclination angles for elliptical/S0 galaxies.Key words: methods: statistical – galaxies: general – galaxies: statistics – galaxies:evolution – large-scale structure of Universe.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3b8699ee5634695792446a53e2085047a6ff16e5

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Citations in the corpus

Spin alignments within the cosmic web: a theory of constrained tidal torques near filaments (2015, background): “Both numerical (e.g. Aragón-Calvo et al. 2007; Hahn et al. 2007; Sousbie et al. 2008; Paz et al. 2008; Zhang et al. 2009; Codis et al. 2012; Libeskind et al. 2013; Aragón-Calvo 2013; Dubois et al. 2014), and observational evidence (e.g. Tempel et al. 2013) have recently supported this scenario.”
Tracing the cosmic web (2017, background): “…scale filamentary structure, which indeed currently is an active subject of investigation (e.g. Aragón-Calvo et al. 2007b; Lee & Pen 2000; Jones et al. 2010; Codis et al. 2012; Tempel et al. 2013; Libeskind et al. 2013a; Tempel & Libeskind 2013; Trowland et al. MNRAS 000, 000–000 (0000) Table 1.”
The Intrinsic Alignment of Galaxies and its Impact on Weak Gravitational Lensing in an Era of Precision Cosmology (2014, background): “…both spiral and elliptical galaxy alignments relative to large-scale filaments and walls of structure (e.g., Jones et al. (2010); Varela et al. (2012); Tempel et al. (2013); Tempel and Libeskind (2013) and references therein), which are now becoming consistent with numerical predictions (see Sec.”
Galaxy Alignments: An Overview (2015, methodology): “Signals and 1σ constraints are shown for the case of void radii larger than 10 Mpc/h, and a shell width at the surface of 4 Mpc/h thickness, from the observations by Trujillo et al. (2006) (green squares), Slosar & White (2009) (red diamonds), and Varela et al. (2012) (blue line and error band), and”
Galaxy Alignments: Observations and Impact on Cosmology (2015, methodology): “In a sample of flattened early-type galaxies, mostly composed of lenticulars, Tempel et al. (2013) observed a significant alignment of spin perpendicular to the filament axis, which again was stronger for the brightest galaxies.”
Detecting filamentary pattern in the cosmic web: a catalogue of filaments for the SDSS (2013, methodology): “The same scale has been also used by Smith et al. (2012) and Tempel et al. (2013) showed that filaments of this size may influence galaxy evolution, so this seems to be the most interesting scale for galaxy filaments.”