Dancing in the dark: galactic properties trace spin swings along the cosmic web

By Y. Dubois, C. Pichon, C. Welker, D. L. Borgne, J. Devriendt, C. Laigle, S. Codis, D. Pogosyan, Stéphane Arnouts, K. Benabed and 23 more. 2014

558 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A large-scale hydrodynamical cosmological simulation, Horizon-AGN , is used to investigate the alignment between the spin of galaxies and the large-scale cosmic filaments above redshift one. The analysis of more than 150 000 galaxies with morphological diversity in a 100h −1 Mpc comoving box size shows that the spin of low-mass, rotationdominated, blue, star-forming galaxies is preferentially aligned with their neighbouring filaments. High-mass, dispersion-dominated, red, quiescent galaxies tend to have a spin perpendicular to nearby filaments. The reorientation of the spin of massive galaxies is provided by galaxy mergers which are significant in the mass build up of high-mass galaxies. We find that the stellar mass transition from alignment to misalignment happens around 3×10 10 M⊙. This is consistent with earlier findings of a dark matter mass transition for the orientation of the spin of halos (5 × 10 11 M⊙ at the same redshift from Codis et al. 2012). With these numerical evidence, we advocate a scenario in which galaxies form in the vorticity-rich neighbourhood of filaments, and migrate towards the nodes of the cosmic web as they convert their orbital angular momentum into spin. The signature of this process can be traced to the physical and morphological properties of galaxies, as measured relative to the cosmic web. We argue that a strong source of feedback such as Active Galactic Nuclei is mandatory to quench in situ star formation in massive galaxies. It allows mergers to play their key role by reducing post-merger gas inflows and, therefore, keeping galaxy spins misaligned with cosmic filaments. It also promotes diversity amongst galaxy properties.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/461a91fe7d1774b9347dba5ac3327d9f5c216a64

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. L. Hernquist
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4. M. Vogelsberger
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Citations in the corpus

• RELATIONS BETWEEN CENTRAL BLACK HOLE MASS AND TOTAL GALAXY STELLAR MASS IN THE LOCAL UNIVERSE (2015, background): “In most cosmological simulations that produce statistical samples of BHs and AGNs, i.e., large uniform-volume simulations (e.g., MassiveBlack I and II, Di Matteo et al. (2012); DeGraf et al. (2014); Illustris, Sijacki et al. (2015); Eagle, Schaye et al. (2015); Horizon-AGN, Dubois et al. (2014)) the”
• Theoretical Challenges in Galaxy Formation (2016, methodology): “…al. (2013) for massive halos; from Puchwein & Springel (2013) using traditional SPH with momentum driven winds and thermal and ’bubble’ AGN heating; from Dubois et al. (2014) (Horizon-AGN) with AMR, mechanical supernova feedback, thermal AGN feedback with variable boost factor and jet-feedback…”
• Star formation sustained by gas accretion (2014, background): “Codis et al. (2012), Laigle et al. (2013), and Dubois et al. (2014) show from cosmological simulations that low mass galaxies, which tend to be disklike, spin in a direction that is aligned to their accretion filaments, but high-mass spheroidal galaxies spin perpendicular to their filaments.”
• The cosmic evolution of massive black holes in the Horizon-AGN simulation (2016, methodology): “The simulation includes prescriptions, described in more details in Dubois et al. (2014), for background UV heating, gas cooling including the contribution from metals released by stellar feedback, star formation following a Schmidt law with a 1 per cent efficiency (Rasera & Teyssier 2006), and…”
• AGN outflows and feedback twenty years on (2018, unknown): “ variable) kinetic coupling efficiency calculated by Costa et al.[42]. The right panel shows coupling efficiencies employed by fiducial AGN feedback models, using the “quasar mode” value where applicable[71, 98, 99, 100, 77]. In these models, a 100% of the injected energy is unlikely to become kinetic ”
• The Horizon-AGN simulation: evolution of galaxy properties over cosmic time (2016, methodology): “While the simulation is described in Dubois et al. (2012) and Dubois et al. (2014), we briefly revisit key aspects of the model here.”
• The merger rate of galaxies in the Illustris simulation: a comparison with observations and semi-empirical models (2015, result): “More recently, Kaviraj et al. (2014) calculated the galaxy merger rate in the Horizon-AGN cosmological hydrodynamical simulation (Dubois et al. 2014) and found a nearly constant evolution with redshift, in disagreement with the results found by Maller et al. (2006), as well as with the ones from…”
• EMERGE – an empirical model for the formation of galaxies since z ∼ 10 (2017, background): “In hydrodynamical simulations the baryonic component is discretised and evolved hydrodynamically (Hirschmann et al. 2014; Vogelsberger et al. 2014; Dubois et al. 2014; Hopkins et al. 2014; Khandai et al. 2015; Schaye et al. 2015), while in semi-analytic models (SAMs) it is separated from the…”
• Galaxy morphology and star formation in the Illustris Simulation at z = 0 (2015, methodology): “…of a ΛCDM universe with high enough spatial resolution to predict the internal structures of galaxies to varying degrees (e.g., Munshi et al. 2013; Ceverino et al. 2014; Christensen et al. 2014; Dubois et al. 2014; Cen 2014; Khandai et al. 2014; Vogelsberger et al. 2014b; Schaye et al. 2014).”
• CONNECTING ANGULAR MOMENTUM AND GALACTIC DYNAMICS: THE COMPLEX INTERPLAY BETWEEN SPIN, MASS, AND MORPHOLOGY (2015, methodology): “…simulations, e.g., the MassiveBlack-II (Khandai et al. 2015), Magneticum Pathfinder (Hirschmann et al. 2014), Illustris (Vogelsberger et al. 2014), Horizon-AGN (Dubois et al. 2014), and EAGLE (Schaye et al. 2015) simulations, have been employed to follow the evolution of structures in the universe.”
• Introducing the Illustris Project: simulating the coevolution of dark and visible matter in the Universe (2014, background): “…holes (SMBHs), etc.] in cosmological simulations that include hydrodynamics and gravity (e.g. Katz 1992; Springel, Di Matteo & Hernquist 2005a; Crain et al. 2009; Schaye et al. 2010; Dubois et al. 2014; Khandai et al. 2014), in principle offering a self-consistent and fully predictive approach.”
• SEMI-ANALYTIC GALAXY EVOLUTION (SAGE): MODEL CALIBRATION AND BASIC RESULTS (2016, background): “…“Standard” in terms of what has been adopted in the literature (e.g. Di Matteo, Springel & Hernquist 2005; Sijacki et al. 2007; Booth & Schaye 2009; Dubois et al. 2014a; Dubois, Volonteri & Silk 2014b; Henriques et al. 2015; Schaye et al. 2015), a value which falls between the efficiency…”
• The Horizon-AGN Simulation: Morphological Diversity of Galaxies ,Promoted by AGN Feedback (2016, methodology): “For that purpose we analyse the state-of-art hydrodynamical cosmological simulations Horizon-AGN (Dubois et al. 2014) and its companion Horizon-noAGN, with strictly identical initial conditions and physics but for a prescription for AGN feedback which is included in the former one but not in the…”
• simba: Cosmological simulations with black hole growth and feedback (2019, unknown): “Horizon-AGN employed Bondi accretion with a two-mode feedback scheme (Dubois et al. 2012), but still used spherical thermal feedback during the high-Eddington growth phase, as later also done in Illustris-TNG.”