The MASSIVE Survey - X. Misalignment between Kinematic and Photometric Axes and Intrinsic Shapes of Massive Early-Type Galaxies

Abstract

We use spatially resolved two-dimensional stellar velocity maps over a $107"\times 107"$ field of view to investigate the kinematic features of 90 early-type galaxies above stellar mass $10^{11.5}{M}_{\odot }$ in the MASSIVE survey. We measure the misalignment angle $\Psi$ between the kinematic and photometric axes and identify local features such as velocity twists and kinematically distinct components. We find 46% of the sample to be well aligned ($\Psi <15^{\circ }$), 33% misaligned, and 21% without detectable rotation (non-rotators). Only 24% of the sample are fast rotators, the majority of which (91%) are aligned, whereas 57% of the slow rotators are misaligned with a nearly flat distribution of $\Psi$ from $15^{\circ }$ to $90^{\circ }$. 11 galaxies have $\Psi \gtrsim 60^{\circ }$ and thus exhibit minor-axis ("prolate") rotation in which the rotation is preferentially around the photometric major axis. Kinematic misalignments occur more frequently for lower galaxy spin or denser galaxy environments. Using the observed misalignment and ellipticity distributions, we infer the intrinsic shape distribution of our sample and find that MASSIVE slow rotators are consistent with being mildly triaxial, with mean axis ratios of $b/a=0.88$ and $c/a=0.65$. In terms of local kinematic features, 51% of the sample exhibit kinematic twists of larger than $20^{\circ }$, and 2 galaxies have kinematically distinct components. The frequency of misalignment and the broad distribution of $\Psi$ reported here suggest that the most massive early-type galaxies are mildly triaxial, and that formation processes resulting in kinematically misaligned slow rotators such as gas-poor mergers occur frequently in this mass range.

arXiv commentAccepted to MNRAS

References in corpus (46)

• The Sloan Digital Sky Survey: Technical Summary
• Parametric Recovery of Line-of-Sight Velocity Distributions from Absorption-Line Spectra of Galaxies via Penalized Likelihood
• Overview of the SDSS-IV MaNGA Survey: Mapping Nearby Galaxies at Apache Point Observatory
• The Eighth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: First Data from SDSS-III
• CALIFA, the Calar Alto Legacy Integral Field Area survey: I. Survey presentation
• The Atlas3D project -- I. A volume-limited sample of 260 nearby early-type galaxies: science goals and selection criteria
• 2MASS Extended Source Catalog: Overview and Algorithms
• The SAURON project -- IX. A kinematic classification for early-type galaxies
• The ATLAS3D project - III. A census of the stellar angular momentum within the effective radius of early-type galaxies: unveiling the distribution of Fast and Slow Rotators
• The Sydney-AAO Multi-object Integral field spectrograph (SAMI)
• Kinemetry: a generalisation of photometry to the higher moments of the line-of-sight velocity distribution
• Structure and Kinematics of Early-Type Galaxies from Integral-Field Spectroscopy
• The SAURON project - III. Integral-field absorption-line kinematics of 48 elliptical and lenticular galaxies
• The ATLAS3D project - II. Morphologies, kinemetric features and alignment between photometric and kinematic axes of early-type galaxies
• Statistical Properties of Collisionless Equal- and Unequal-Mass Merger Remnants of Disk Galaxies
• Kinematic Structure of Merger Remnants
• CALIFA: a diameter-selected sample for an integral field spectroscopy galaxy survey
• Red Mergers and the Assembly of Massive Elliptical Galaxies: the Fundamental Plane and its Projections
• Kinematic properties of early-type galaxy haloes using planetary nebulae
• The MASSIVE Survey - I. A Volume-Limited Integral-Field Spectroscopic Study of the Most Massive Early-Type Galaxies within 108 Mpc
• The SAGES Legacy Unifying Globulars and GalaxieS Survey (SLUGGS): Sample definition, methods, and initial results
• Rotation and anisotropy of galaxies revisited
• Dissipationless Mergers of Elliptical Galaxies and the Evolution of the Fundamental Plane
• The Atlas3D project - XXIV. The intrinsic shape distribution of early-type galaxies
• Specific Angular Momentum of Disc Merger Remnants and the ${\lambda }_R$-Parameter
• Tracing kinematic (mis)alignments in CALIFA merging galaxies: Stellar and ionized gas kinematic orientations at every merger stage
• The MASSIVE Survey - V. Spatially-Resolved Stellar Angular Momentum, Velocity Dispersion, and Higher Moments of the 41 Most Massive Local Early-Type Galaxies
• The shapes of galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• The MASSIVE Survey - VII. The Relationship of Angular Momentum, Stellar Mass and Environment of Early-Type Galaxies
• The SAMI Galaxy Survey: mass as the driver of the kinematic morphology - density relation in clusters
• The MASSIVE Survey - VIII. Stellar Velocity Dispersion Profiles and Environmental Dependence of Early-Type Galaxies
• Kinematic alignment of non-interacting CALIFA galaxies: Quantifying the impact of bars on stellar and ionised gas velocity field orientations
• The extended Planetary Nebula Spectrograph (ePN.S) early-type galaxy survey. The kinematic diversity of stellar halos and the relation between halo transition scale and stellar mass
• The origin and properties of massive prolate galaxies in the Illustris simulation
• The SAMI Pilot Survey: Stellar Kinematics of Galaxies in Abell 85, 168 and 2399
• Simulating multiple merger pathways to the central kinematics of early-type galaxies
• The SAMI Galaxy Survey: the intrinsic shape of kinematically selected galaxies
• Climbing to the top of the galactic mass ladder: evidence for frequent prolate-like rotation among the most massive galaxies
• Angular Momenta, Dynamical Masses, and Mergers of Brightest Cluster Galaxies
• Spatial kinematics of Brightest Cluster Galaxies and their close companions from Integral Field Unit spectroscopy
• The Planetary Nebula Spectrograph survey of S0 galaxy kinematics. Data and Overview
• The Stellar Haloes of Massive Elliptical Galaxies III: Kinematics at Large Radius
• CALIFA reveals Prolate Rotation in Massive Early-type Galaxies: A Polar Galaxy Merger Origin?
• The MASSIVE Survey IX: Photometric Analysis of 35 High Mass Early-Type Galaxies with HST WFC3/IR
• Galaxies with prolate rotation in Illustris
• The MASSIVE Survey VI: The Spatial Distribution and Kinematics of Warm Ionized Gas in the Most Massive Local Early-type Galaxies

Cited by in corpus (35)

• Is every strong lens model unhappy in its own way? Uniform modelling of a sample of 13 quadruply+ imaged quasars
• The ultra-diffuse galaxy NGC 1052-DF2 with MUSE: I. Kinematics of the stellar body
• The MASSIVE survey - XI. What drives the molecular gas properties of early-type galaxies
• The stellar halos of ETGs in the IllustrisTNG simulations: the photometric and kinematic diversity of galaxies at large radii
• The simultaneous formation of cored, tangentially biased, and kinematically decoupled centers in massive early-type galaxies
• Infrared Surface Brightness Fluctuation Distances for MASSIVE and Type Ia Supernova Host Galaxies
• The MASSIVE Survey - XII Connecting Stellar Populations of Early-Type Galaxies to Kinematics and Environment
• Keck Integral-Field Spectroscopy of M87 Reveals an Intrinsically Triaxial Galaxy and a Revised Black Hole Mass
• Testing strong lensing subhalo detection with a cosmological simulation
• The MASSIVE Survey -- XV. A Stellar Dynamical Mass Measurement of the Supermassive Black Hole in Massive Elliptical Galaxy NGC 1453
• Triaxial Orbit-based Dynamical Modeling of Galaxies with Supermassive Black Holes and an Application to Massive Elliptical Galaxy NGC 1453
• Non-parametric Triaxial Deprojection of Elliptical Galaxies
• Prospects for Recovering Galaxy Intrinsic Shapes from Projected Quantities
• The MASSIVE Survey -- XVII. A Triaxial Orbit-based Determination of the Black Hole Mass and Intrinsic Shape of Elliptical Galaxy NGC 2693
• Merger histories of brightest group galaxies from MUSE stellar kinematics
• The MASSIVE Survey XIV -- Stellar Velocity Profiles and Kinematic Misalignments from 200 pc to 20 kpc in Massive Early-type Galaxies
• The MASSIVE Survey XIII -- Spatially Resolved Stellar Kinematics in the Central 1 kpc of 20 Massive Elliptical Galaxies with the GMOS-North Integral-Field Spectrograph
• A search for ionised gas outflows in an Halpha imaging atlas of nearby LINERs
• Accuracy and precision of triaxial orbit models I: SMBH mass, stellar mass and dark-matter halo
• The isotropic center of NGC 5419 -- A core in formation?
• Galaxies with kinematically distinct cores in Illustris
• Accuracy and precision of triaxial orbit models II: Viewing angles, shape and orbital structure
• The MASSIVE survey -- XIX. Molecular gas measurements of the supermassive black hole masses in the elliptical galaxies NGC 1684 and NGC 0997
• Atomic Hydrogen Clues to the Formation of Counterrotating Stellar Discs
• Ubiquitous signs of interactions in early-type galaxies with prolate rotation
• Intrinsic shapes of Brightest Cluster Galaxies
• On the application of dimensionality reduction and clustering algorithms for the classification of kinematic morphologies of galaxies
• Signatures of Massive Black Hole Merger Host Galaxies from Cosmological Simulations II: Unique Stellar Kinematics in Integral Field Unit Spectroscopy
• Shapes of dark matter haloes with discrete globular cluster dynamics: The example of NGC 5128 (Centaurus A)
• Photometric and Kinematic Misalignments and Their Evolution Among Fast and Slow Rotators in the Illustris Simulation
• The Outskirt Stellar Mass of Low-Redshift Massive Galaxies is an Excellent Halo Mass Proxy in Illustris/IllustrisTNG Simulations
• Galaxy 3D Shape Recovery using Mixture Density Network
• Multi-spin stellar velocity maps of the most massive galaxies
• Reconstructing the Assembly of Massive Galaxies. III: Quiescent Galaxies Loose Angular Momentum as They Evolve in a Mass-dependent Fashion
• The kinematic imprinting of environmental quenching in $z<0.2$ galaxies