The role of spin in the formation and evolution of galaxies

Abstract

Using the SDSS spectroscopic sample, we estimate the dark matter halo spin parameter lambda for ~53,000 disk galaxies for which MOPED star formation histories are available. We investigate the relationship between spin and total stellar mass, star formation history, and environment. First, we find a clear anti-correlation between stellar mass and spin, with low mass galaxies generally having high dark matter spins. Second, galaxies which have formed more than ~5% of their stars in the last 0.2 Gyr have more broadly distributed and typically higher spins (including a significant fraction with lambda > 0.1) than galaxies which formed a large fraction of their stars more than 10 Gyr ago. Finally, we find little or no correlation between the value of spin of the dark halo and environment as determined both by proximity to a new cluster catalog and a marked correlation study. This agrees well with the predictions from linear hierarchical torquing theory and numerical simulations.

Accepted to MNRAS after moderate revision

References in corpus (10)

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Cited by in corpus (6)

• On the baryonic, stellar, and luminous scaling relations of disk galaxies
• Angular momentum and clustering properties of early dark matter halos
• On the environment of Low Surface Brightness galaxies at different scales
• HIghMass - High HI Mass, HI-Rich Galaxies at $z\sim 0$: Combined HI and H${}_2$ Observations
• The galactic spin of AGN galaxies
• Spin Alignment of Dark Matter Halos: Mad Halos