Angular Momentum Distribution of Hot Gas and Implications for Disk Galaxy Formation

Abstract

We study the angular momentum profiles both for dark matter and for gas within virialized halos using a statistical sample of halos drawn from cosmological hydrodynamics simulations. Three simulations have been analyzed: one is the nonradiative simulation and the other two have radiative cooling. We find that the gas component, on average, has a larger spin and contains a smaller fraction of mass with negative angular momentum than its dark matter counterpart in the nonradiative model. As to the cooling models, the gas component shares approximately the same spin parameter as its dark matter counterpart, but the hot gas has a higher spin and is more aligned in angular momentum than dark matter, while the opposite holds for the cold gas. After the mass of negative angular momentum is excluded, the angular momentum profile of the hot gas component approximately follows the universal function originally proposed by Bullock et al. for dark matter, though the shape parameter μ is much larger for hot gas and is comfortably in the range required by observations of disk galaxies. Since disk formation is related to the distribution of hot gas that will cool, our study may explain the fact that the disk component of observed galaxies contains a smaller fraction of low angular momentum material than dark matter in halos.