On the Environmental Dependence of Galaxy Properties Established by the Initial Cosmological Conditions

Abstract

We study theoretically how the initial cosmological conditions establish the dependence of galaxy properties on the environment. First, we adopt the linear tidal torque theory according to which the angular momentum of a proto-galaxy is generated at first order by the misalignment between the proto-galaxy inertia tensor and the local tidal tensor. Then, we quantify analytically the degree of the misalignment between the two tensors, and show quantitatively that it increases as the density of the environment decreases. It implies that the proto-galaxies forming in the lower density regions should end up with having higher angular momentum than those in the higher density regions, which is consistent with recent numerical finding that the void and field galaxies have higher spin parameters than the cluster galaxies. Since the galaxy angular momentum plays a role of developing a disk-like structure and hindering the star-formation, our theoretical insight provides an answer to such fundamental observational question as why the large void galaxies have young stellar populations and high specific star formation rate, which was not explained by the previous morphology-density relation.

arXiv commentaccepted version, ApJL in press, all typos corrected

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Cited by in corpus (9)

• The Caterpillar Project: A Large Suite of Milky Way Sized Halos
• The evolution of early and late type galaxies in the COSMOS up to z~1.2
• Environmental Influences on the Morphology and Dynamics of Group Size Haloes
• Galactic angular momenta and angular momentum couplings in the large-scale structure
• Rotation of Cosmic Voids and Void-Spin Statistics
• The Anisotropic Two-Point Correlation Functions of the Nonlinear Traceless Tidal Field in the Principal-Axis Frame
• An Observed Transition of Galaxy Spins on the Void Surfaces
• A New Perspective on the Large-Scale Tidal Effect on the Galaxy Luminosity and Morphology
• An observational signal of the void shape correlation and its link to the cosmic web