Detection of the Intrinsic Spin Alignments in Isolated Spiral Pairs

TL;DR

This study presents observational evidence of intrinsic spin alignments in isolated spiral galaxy pairs, showing strong alignment signals that contrast with simulation results, highlighting potential gaps in current galaxy formation models.

Contribution

The paper provides the first observational detection of intrinsic spin alignment in isolated spiral pairs and compares it with simulation results, revealing discrepancies.

Findings

Strong spin alignment detected at 99.9999% confidence level

Alignment strongest in pairs of early-type spiral galaxies

Simulation fails to reproduce the observed alignment signals

Abstract

An observational evidence for the intrinsic galaxy alignments in isolated spiral pairs is presented. From the catalog of the galaxy groups identified by Tempel et al. in the flux limited galaxy sample of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 10, we select those groups consisting only of two spiral galaxies as isolated spiral pairs and investigate if and how strongly the spin axes of their two spiral members are aligned with each other. We detect a clear signal of intrinsic spin alignment in the isolated spiral pairs, which leads to the rejection of the null hypothesis at the $99.9999\%$ confidence level via the Rayleigh test. It is also found that those isolated pairs comprising two early-type spiral galaxies exhibit the strongest signal of intrinsic spin alignment and that the strength of the alignment signal depends on the angular separation distance as well as on the luminosity ratio of the member galaxies. Using the dark matter halos consisting of only two subhalos resolved in the EAGLE hydrodynamic simulations, we repeat the same analysis but fail to find any alignment tendency between the spin angular momentum vectors of the stellar components of the subhalos, which is in tension with the observational result. A couple of possible sources of this apparent inconsistency between the observational and the numerical results are discussed.