Galaxy Formation and the Cosmological Angular Momentum Problem

Abstract

The importance of angular momentum in regulating the sizes of galactic disks and by this their star formation history is highlighted. Tidal torques and accretion of satellites in principle provide enough angular momentum to form disks with sizes that are in agreement with observations. However three major problems have been identified that challenge cold dark matter theory and affect models of galaxy evolution: (1) too much angular momentum is transferred from the gas to the dark halos during infall, leading to disks with scale lengths that are too small, (2) bulgeless disks require more specific angular momentum than is generated cosmologically even if gas would not lose angular momentum during infall, (3) gravitational torques and hierarchical merging produce a specific angular momentum distribution that does not match the distribution required to form exponential disks naturally; some gas has exceptionally high angular momentum, leading to extended outer disks while another large gas fraction will contain very little specific angular momentum and is expected to fall into the galactic center, forming a massive and dominant bulge component. Any self-consistent theory of galaxy formation will require to provide solutions to these questions. Selective mass loss of low-angular-momentum gas in an early phase of galaxy evolution currently seems to be the most promising scenario. Such a process would have a strong affect on the early protogalactic evolution phase, the origin and evolution of galactic morphologies and link central properties of galaxies like the origin of central massive black holes with their global structure.

16 pages, 7 postscript files, requires kapproc.cls and procps.sty; to appear in "Penetrating Bars Through Masks of Cosmic Dust: The Hubble Tuning Fork Strikes a New Note", ed. Block, Freeman, Puerari and Groess, Dordrecht: Kluwer

References in corpus (1)

• Angular momentum distribution of hot gas and implications for disk galaxy formation

Cited by in corpus (12)

• Bulgeless Giant Galaxies Challenge our Picture of Galaxy Formation by Hierarchical Clustering
• Bulge n and B/T in High Mass Galaxies: Constraints on the Origin of Bulges in Hierarchical Models
• Angular momentum and galaxy formation revisited
• Bars in Disk-Dominated and Bulge-Dominated Galaxies at z~0: New Insights from ~3600 SDSS Galaxies
• The Evolution of the Dark Halo Spin Parameters lambda and lambda' in a LCDM Universe: The Role of Minor and Major Mergers
• Structure Formation Inside Triaxial Dark Matter Halos: Galactic Disks, Bulges and Bars
• Thermal instabilities in cooling galactic coronae: fuelling star formation in galactic discs
• The Radius of Baryonic Collapse in Disc Galaxy Formation
• Gravitational self-interactions of a degenerate quantum scalar field
• The Spin Alignments in Galaxy Pairs as a Test of Bouncing Coupled Dark Energy
• Effect of dark matter halo substructures on galaxy rotation curves
• The Challenge of Modelling Galactic Disks