How the Galaxy Stellar Spins Acquire a Peculiar Tidal Connection?

TL;DR

This study investigates how galaxy stellar spins become aligned with local tidal fields, contrasting with dark matter spins, and finds that baryonic processes influence these peculiar alignments at low redshift.

Contribution

It reveals the correlation between galaxy stellar spin alignments and baryonic properties, highlighting the role of baryonic processes in tidal alignments at low redshift.

Findings

Stellar spins align with tidal axes more strongly at z≤0.5.

Galaxy properties like black hole mass ratio correlate with spin alignment.

Peculiar alignments likely caused by baryonic processes discharging stellar material.

Abstract

We explore how the galaxy stellar spins acquire a peculiar tendency of being aligned with the major principal axes of the local tidal fields, in contrast to their DM counterparts which tend to be perpendicular to them, regardless of their masses. Analyzing the halo and subhalo catalogs from the IllustrisTNG 300 hydrodynamic simulations at $z\le 1$, we determine the cosines of the alignment angles, $\cos\alpha$, between the galaxy stellar and DM spins. Creating four $\cos\alpha$-selected samples of the galaxies and then controlling them to share the same density and mass distributions, we determine the average strengths of the alignments between the galaxy stellar spins and the tidal tensor major axes over each sample. It is clearly shown that at $z\le 0.5$ the more severely the galaxy stellar spin directions deviate from the DM counterparts, the stronger the peculiar tidal alignments become. Taking the ensemble averages of such galaxy properties as central blackhole to stellar mass ratio, specific star formation rate, formation epoch, stellar-to-total mass ratio, velocity dispersions, average metallicity, and degree of the cosmic web anisotropy over each sample, we also find that all of these properties exhibit either strong correlations or anti-correlations with $\cos\alpha$. Our results imply that the peculiar tidal alignments of the galaxy stellar spins may be caused by anisotropic occurrence of some baryonic process responsible for discharging stellar materials from the galaxies along the tidal major directions at $z<1$.