ON THE INTRINSIC ALIGNMENTS OF THE LATE-TYPE SPIRAL GALAXIES FROM THE SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY DATA RELEASE 7

Journal Article · Tue May 10 04:00:00 EDT 2011 · Astrophysical Journal

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1088/0004-637X/732/2/99· OSTI ID:21576859

Lee, Jounghun ^[1]

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1. Astronomy Program, Department of Physics and Astronomy, FPRD, Seoul National University, Seoul 151-747 (Korea, Republic of)

A robust detection of the tidally induced intrinsic alignments of the late-type spiral galaxies with high statistical significance is reported. From the spectroscopic galaxy sample of Sloan Digital Sky Survey DR7 compiled by Huertas-Company et al., which lists each galaxy's probabilities of being in five Hubble types, P(E), P(Ell), P(S0), P(Sab), P(Scd), we select the nearby large late-type spiral galaxies which have redshifts of 0 {<=} z {<=} 0.02, probabilities of P(Scd) {>=} 0.5, and angular sizes of D {>=} 7.92 arcsec. The spin axes of the selected nearby large late-type spiral galaxies are determined up to the two-fold ambiguity with the help of the circular thin-disk approximation, and their spatial correlations are measured as a function of the separation distance r. A clear signal of the intrinsic correlation as high as 3.4{sigma} and 2.4{sigma} is found at the separation distance of r {approx} 1 h{sup -1} Mpc and r {approx} 2 h{sup -1} Mpc, respectively. The comparison of this observational results with the analytic model based on the tidal torque theory reveals that the spin correlation function for the late-type spiral galaxies follows the quadratic scaling of the linear density correlation and that the intrinsic correlations of the galaxy spin axes are stronger than that of the underlying dark halos. We investigate a local density dependence of the galaxy spin correlations and found that the correlations are stronger for the galaxies located in dense regions having more than 10 neighbors within 2 h{sup -1} Mpc. We also attempt to measure a luminosity dependence of the galaxy spin correlations, but find that it is impossible with our magnitude-split samples to disentangle a luminosity from a redshift dependence. We provide the physical explanations for these observational results and also discuss the effects of possible residual systematics on the results.

• OSTI ID: 21576859
• Journal Information: Astrophysical Journal, Journal Name: Astrophysical Journal Journal Issue: 2 Vol. 732; ISSN ASJOAB; ISSN 0004-637X
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS
ALIGNMENT
ANGULAR MOMENTUM
CORRELATION FUNCTIONS
DENSITY
FUNCTIONS
GALAXIES
LUMINOSITY
OPTICAL PROPERTIES
PARTICLE PROPERTIES
PHYSICAL PROPERTIES
SPIN