Mathematics – Logic
Scientific paper
Jan 2009
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2009aas...21331503p&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #213, #315.03; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 41, p.292
Mathematics
Logic
Scientific paper
Even though galaxy orientations have been studied statistically for over 70 years now, it is only recently that alignments have been found on scales larger than those of close interacting pairs. This is, most directly, a consequence of the new era of wide field surveys like the SDSS and 2dF, which are providing access to reliable shape measurements of hundreds of thousands of galaxies for the first time. Progress in the field is also strongly driven by the weak lensing community, for whom intrinsic alignments are an important (and, as yet, poorly understood) contaminant to their measurements.
In this talk, I will focus on radial alignment of satellite galaxies, in which the satellite's long axis points preferentially toward the center of its host. I will present observational evidence for this type of alignment over a wide range of systems, from the most massive clusters to small galaxy groups like our own. Using results from N-body cosmological simulations, I will argue that this effect is the result of a secular tidal interaction between the galaxies and their host potential. Our results show that subhalos are effectively torqued by their host throughout their orbits, so that their major axes tend to be aligned with the gradient of the host potential.
I will then discuss a few possible consequences of this gravitational torquing for galaxy evolution. Orbital decay, disk heating and disk warping are all likely to be important and I will explore the magnitude of these effects with a set of high resolution numerical experiments on individual, multi-component, N-body galaxy models embedded in analytical external potentials.
Bryan Greg L.
Pereira Maria
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