CONNECTING ANGULAR MOMENTUM AND GALACTIC DYNAMICS: THE COMPLEX INTERPLAY BETWEEN SPIN, MASS, AND MORPHOLOGY

By Adelheid F. Teklu, R. Remus, Klaus Dolag, A. Beck, A. Burkert, Andreas S Schmidt, F. Schulze, L. Steinborn. 2015

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The evolution and distribution of the angular momentum of dark matter (DM) halos have been discussed in several studies over the past decades. In particular, the idea arose that angular momentum conservation should allow us to infer the total angular momentum of the entire DM halo from measuring the angular momentum of the baryonic component, which is populating the center of the halo, especially for disk galaxies. To test this idea and to understand the connection between the angular momentum of the DM halo and its galaxy, we use a state-of-the-art, hydrodynamical cosmological simulation taken from the set of Magneticum Pathfinder simulations. Thanks to the inclusion of the relevant physical processes, the improved underlying numerical methods, and high spatial resolution, we successfully produce populations of spheroidal and disk galaxies self-consistently. Thus, we are able to study the dependence of galactic properties on their morphology. We find that (1) the specific angular momentum of stars in disk and spheroidal galaxies as a function of their stellar mass compares well with observational results; (2) the specific angular momentum of the stars in disk galaxies is slightly smaller compared to the specific angular momentum of the cold gas, in good agreement with observations; (3) simulations including the baryonic component show a dichotomy in the specific stellar angular momentum distribution when splitting the galaxies according to their morphological type (this dichotomy can also be seen in the spin parameter, where disk galaxies populate halos with slightly larger spin compared to spheroidal galaxies); (4) disk galaxies preferentially populate halos in which the angular momentum vector of the DM component in the central part shows a better alignment to the angular momentum vector of the entire halo; and (5) the specific angular momentum of the cold gas in disk galaxies is approximately 40% smaller than the specific angular momentum of the total DM halo and shows a significant scatter.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/efe9007ee35d8ddd277c814dd62678b64ed2b681

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Citations in the corpus

Baryon impact on the halo mass function: Fitting formulae and implications for cluster cosmology (2015, background): “; see also Hirschmann et al. 2014; Saro et al. 2014; Dolag, Komatsu & Sunyaev 2015; Teklu et al. 2015).”