The Alignments of the Galaxy Spins with the Real-Space Tidal Field Reconstructed from the Two Mass Redshift Survey

TL;DR

This study provides observational evidence that galaxy spins are aligned with the real-space tidal field, supporting the tidal torque theory and offering a new way to probe dark matter distribution.

Contribution

First direct observational confirmation of galaxy spin alignments with the tidal field reconstructed from large-scale surveys.

Findings

Galaxy spins align with the intermediate principal axes of the tidal shear.

The correlation is stronger in high-density regions.

The correlation slightly decreases with increasing galaxy morphological type.

Abstract

We report a direct observational evidence for the existence of the galaxy spin alignments with the real space tidal field. We calculate the real space tidal field from the real space density field reconstructed recently from the Two Mass Redshift Survey (2MRS) by Erdogdu et al. in 2006. Using a total of 12122 nearby spiral galaxies from the Tully Galaxy Catalog, we calculate the orientations of their spin axes relative to the 2MRS tidal field. We find a clear signal of the intrinsic correlations between the galaxy spins and the intermediate principal axes of the tidal shears. The null hypothesis of no correlation is rejected at 99.99 % confidence level. We also investigate the dependence of the intrinsic correlations on the galaxy morphological type and the environment. It is found that (i) the intrinsic correlation depends weakly on the morphological type of the spiral galaxies but tends to decrease slightly as the type increases; (ii) it is stronger in the high-density regions than in the low-density regions. The observational result is quantitatively consistent with analytic prediction based on the tidal torque theory. It is concluded that the galaxy spin orientations may provide in principle a new complimentary probe of the dark matter distribution.