Determination of Galaxy Spin Vectors in the Pisces-Perseus Supercluster with the Arecibo Telescope

Abstract

We use HI observations made with the upgraded Arecibo 305M Telescope in August 1998 to obtain accurate spin vector determinations for 54 nearly edge-on galaxies in the Minnesota Automated Plate Scanner Pisces-Perseus Survey (MAPS-PP). We introduce a simple observational technique of determining the sense of rotation for galaxies, even when their HI disks are not fully resolved. We examined the spin vector distribution of these 54 galaxies for evidence of preferential galaxy alignments. We use the Kuiper statistic, a variant of the Kolmogorov--Smirnov statistic, to determine the significance of any anisotropies in the distribution of galaxy spin vectors. The possibility of ``spin vector domains'' is also investigated. We find no significant evidence of preferential galaxy alignments in this sample. However, we show tha t the small sample size places weak limits on the level of galaxy alignments.

22 pages, 7 figures, Accepted for Publication in Astronomical Journal

References in corpus (2)

• Alignment and morphology of elliptical galaxies: the influence of the cluster tidal field
• The Orientation of Spin Vectors of Galaxies in the Ursa Major Filament

Cited by in corpus (11)

• The 2MASS Redshift Survey - Description and Data Release
• Internal and External Alignment of the Shapes and Angular Momenta of LCDM Halos
• Weak lensing surveys and the intrinsic correlation of galaxy ellipticities
• Cosmic Shear from Galaxy Spins
• Galaxy Spin Statistics and Spin-Density Correlation
• Tentative Detection of Galaxy Spin Correlations in the Tully Catalogue
• Global and Local Effects of Rotation: Observational Aspects
• Orientation of Galaxies in the Local Supercluster: A Review
• Some remarks on the angular momenta of galaxies, their clusters and superclusters
• A search for Low Surface Brightness galaxies in the near-infrared II. Arecibo HI line observations
• Galaxies on the Blue Edge