Probing the History of the Galaxy Assembly of the Counter-rotating Disk Galaxy PGC 66551

TL;DR

This study investigates the formation history of a galaxy with counter-rotating stellar disks, revealing insights into external accretion processes and galaxy assembly through detailed spectroscopic analysis and modeling.

Contribution

The paper provides the first detailed analysis of PGC 66551's counter-rotating disks, including their properties and a model favoring merger with a gas-rich satellite as the formation mechanism.

Findings

CR disk is compact, young, and metal-poor

Main disk is older with lower metallicity than other CR galaxies

Merger with a gas-rich satellite likely formed the CR disk

Abstract

Stellar counter-rotation in disk galaxies directly relates to the complex phenomenon of the disk mass assembly believed to be driven by external processes, such as accretion and mergers. The detailed study of such systems makes it possible to reveal the source of external accretion and establish the details of this process. In this paper, we investigate the galaxy PGC 66551 (MaNGA ID 1-179561) which hosts two large-scale counter-rotating (CR) stellar disks identified in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey MaNGA data and then confirmed using deep follow-up spectroscopy with the 10m Southern African Large Telescope. We measured the properties of ionized gas and stellar populations of both CR disks in PGC 66551. We found that the CR disk is compact, contains young stars with subsolar metallicity, and has a stellar mass of $5\times10^{9}$ M$_\odot$ which amounts to $\approx$20% of the galaxy's total. Surprisingly, the main 8 Gyr old disk has a significantly lower metallicity of -0.8 dex than other CR galaxies. We developed a simple analytic model of the history of the metal enrichment, which we applied to PGC 66551 and constrained the parameters of the galactic outflow wind, and estimated the metallicity of the infalling gas that formed the CR disk to be -0.9 ... -0.5 dex. Our interpretation prefers a merger with a gas-rich satellite over cold accretion from a cosmic filament as a source of gas, which then formed the CR disk in PGC 66551.