Winding sense of galaxies around the Local Supercluster

TL;DR

This study analyzes the winding sense of 1,621 galaxies around the Local Supercluster, revealing patterns in their orientations and classifications, with implications for understanding galaxy formation and alignment.

Contribution

It provides a detailed statistical analysis of galaxy winding senses and their alignments, highlighting differences between galaxy types and the invariance under cosmic expansion.

Findings

Homogeneous distribution of S- and Z-shaped galaxies in late-type spirals.

S-mode galaxies are predominantly found in barred spirals.

Z-mode galaxies tend to align with the equatorial plane.

Abstract

We present an analysis of the winding sense (S and Z-shaped) of 1\,621 field galaxies that have radial velocity between 3\,000 km s$^{-1}$ to 5\,000 km s$^{-1}$. The preferred alignments of S- and Z-shaped galaxies are studied using chi-square, auto-correlation and the Fourier tests. We classified total galaxies into 32 subsamples and noticed a good agreement between the position angle (PA) distribution of S- and Z-shaped galaxies. The homogeneous distribution of the S- and Z-shaped galaxies is noticed for the late-type spirals (Sc, Scd, Sd and Sm) than that of the early-types (Sa, Sab, Sb and Sbc). A significant dominance of S-mode galaxies is noticed in the barred spirals. A random alignment is noticed in the PA-distribution of Z- and S-mode spirals. In addition, homogeneous distribution of the S- and Z-shaped galaxies is found to be invariant under the global expansion. The PA-distribution of the total S-mode galaxies is found to be random, whereas preferred alignment is noticed for the total Z-mode galaxies. It is found that the galactic planes of Z-mode galaxies tend to lie in the equatorial plane.