Alignment Of Galaxies Research Articles

Brightest Cluster Galaxy Alignments in Merging Clusters

Abstract The orientations of brightest cluster galaxies (BCGs) and their host clusters tend to be aligned, but the mechanism driving this is not clear. To probe the role of cluster mergers in this process, we quantify alignments of 38 BCGs in 22 clusters undergoing major mergers (up to ∼1 Gyr after first pericenter). We find alignments entirely consistent with those of clusters in general. This suggests that alignments are robust against major cluster mergers. If, conversely, major cluster mergers actually help orient the BCG, such a process is acting quickly because the orientation is in place within ∼1 Gyr after first pericenter.

Publisher Correction: Ten billion years of brightest cluster galaxy alignments

When this Letter was originally published, Supplementary Table 1 was mistakenly omitted; it is now available at https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-019-0728-9 .

Cosmology from cosmic shear power spectra with Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam first-year data

Abstract We measure cosmic weak lensing shear power spectra with the Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) survey first-year shear catalog covering 137 deg2 of the sky. Thanks to the high effective galaxy number density of ∼17 arcmin−2, even after conservative cuts such as a magnitude cut of i < 24.5 and photometric redshift cut of 0.3 ≤ z ≤ 1.5, we obtain a high-significance measurement of the cosmic shear power spectra in four tomographic redshift bins, achieving a total signal-to-noise ratio of 16 in the multipole range 300 ≤ ℓ ≤ 1900. We carefully account for various uncertainties in our analysis including the intrinsic alignment of galaxies, scatters and biases in photometric redshifts, residual uncertainties in the shear measurement, and modeling of the matter power spectrum. The accuracy of our power spectrum measurement method as well as our analytic model of the covariance matrix are tested against realistic mock shear catalogs. For a flat Λ cold dark matter model, we find $S\,_{8}\equiv \sigma _8(\Omega _{\rm m}/0.3)^\alpha =0.800^{+0.029}_{-0.028}$ for α = 0.45 ($S\,_8=0.780^{+0.030}_{-0.033}$ for α = 0.5) from our HSC tomographic cosmic shear analysis alone. In comparison with Planck cosmic microwave background constraints, our results prefer slightly lower values of S8, although metrics such as the Bayesian evidence ratio test do not show significant evidence for discordance between these results. We study the effect of possible additional systematic errors that are unaccounted for in our fiducial cosmic shear analysis, and find that they can shift the best-fit values of S8 by up to ∼0.6 σ in both directions. The full HSC survey data will contain several times more area, and will lead to significantly improved cosmological constraints.

Detecting galaxy-filament alignments in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III.

Previous studies have shown the filamentary structures in the cosmic web influence the alignments of nearby galaxies. We study this effect in the LOWZ sample of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey using the 'Cosmic Web Reconstruction' filament catalogue. We find that LOWZ galaxies exhibit a small but statistically significant alignment in the direction parallel to the orientation of nearby filaments. This effect is detectable even in the absence of nearby galaxy clusters, which suggests it is an effect from the matter distribution in the filament. A non-parametric regression model suggests that the alignment effect with filaments extends over separations of 30-40 Mpc. We find that galaxies that are bright and early-forming align more strongly with the directions of nearby filaments than those that are faint and late-forming; however, trends with stellar mass are less statistically significant, within the narrow range of stellar mass of this sample.

Investigation of the orientation of galaxies in clusters: the importance, methods and results of research

Various models of structure formation can account for various aspects of the galaxy formation process on different scales, as well as for various observational features of structures. Thus, the investigation of galaxies orientation constitute a standard test of galaxies formation scenarios since observed variations in angular momentum represent fundamental constraints for any model of galaxy formation. We have improved the method of analysis of the alignment of galaxies in clusters. Now, the method allows to analyze both position angles of galaxy major axes and two angles describing the spatial orientation of galaxies. The distributions of analyzed angles were tested for isotropy by applying different statistical tests. For sample of analyzed clusters we have computed the mean values of analyzed statistics, checking whether they are the same as expected ones in the case of random distribution of analyzed angles. The detailed discussion of this method has been performed. We have shown how to proceed in many particular cases in order to improve the statistical reasoning when analyzing the distribution of the angles in the observational data. Separately, we have compared these new results with those obtained from numerical simulations. We show how powerful is our method on the example of galaxy orientation analysis in 247 Abell rich galaxy clusters. We have found that the orientations of galaxies in analyzed clusters are not random. It means that we genuinely confirmed an existence of the alignment of galaxies in rich Abells' galaxy clusters. This result is independent from the clusters of Bautz-Morgan types.

The dependence of intrinsic alignment of galaxies on wavelength using KiDS and GAMA

The outer regions of galaxies are more susceptible to the tidal interactions that lead to intrinsic alignments of galaxies. The resulting alignment signal may therefore depend on the passband if the colours of galaxies vary spatially. To quantify this, we measured the shapes of galaxies with spectroscopic redshifts from the GAMA survey using deep gri imaging data from the KiloDegree Survey. The performance of the moment-based shape measurement algorithm DEIMOS was assessed using dedicated image simulations, which showed that the ellipticities could be determined with an accuracy better than 1% in all bands. Additional tests for potential systematic errors did not reveal any issues. We measure a significant difference of the alignment signal between the g, r and i-band observations. This difference exceeds the amplitude of the linear alignment model on scales below 2 Mpc h−1. Separating the sample into central/satellite and red/blue galaxies, we find that the difference is dominated by red satellite galaxies.

The shape alignment of satellite galaxies in Local Group-like pairs from the SDSS

It has been shown, both in simulations and observationally, that the tidal field of a large galaxy can torque its satellites such that the major axis of satellite galaxies points towards their hosts. This so-called `shape alignment' has been observed in isolated Milky Way-like galaxies but not in `Local Group'-like pairs. In this study, we investigate the shape alignment of satellite galaxies in galaxy pairs similar to the Local Group identified in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 13 (SDSS DR13). By stacking tens of thousands of satellite galaxies around primary galaxy pairs, we find two statistically strong alignment signals. (1) The major axes of satellite galaxies located in the (projected) area between two primaries (the {\it facing} region) tend to be perpendicular to the line connecting the satellite to its host (tangential alignment), while (2) the major axes of satellite galaxies located in regions away from the other host (the {\it away} region) tend to be aligned with the line connecting the satellite to its host (radial alignment). These alignments are confirmed at $\sim5\sigma$ levels. The alignment signal increases with increasing primary brightness, decreasing pair separation, and decreasing satellite distance. The alignment signal is also found to be stronger in filamentary environments. These findings will shed light on understanding the mechanisms of how satellite galaxies are affected by the tidal field in galaxy pairs and will be useful for investigating galaxy intrinsic alignment in the analyses of weak gravitational lensing.

Self-calibration method for II and GI types of intrinsic alignments of galaxies

We introduce a self-calibration method that can be applied to the intrinsic ellipticity--intrinsic ellipticity (II) and gravitational shear -- intrinsic ellipticity (GI) types of intrinsic alignment of galaxies. The method combines previous self-calibration techniques with modifications to one of them in order to use auto-spectra in addition to cross-spectra between redshift bins. This allows one to use the self-calibration while preserving all the constraining power of cosmic shear from surveys. We show that the new method provides more flexibility in using various redshift bin widths. We perform cosmological parameter constraint forecast when this method is applied to the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). Compared to the original self-calibration, we find that the new method provides further significant reduction in any residual shift in the cosmological parameters (e.g. factors of $2-4$ for the dark energy equation of state) which is promising for accurate cosmology.

The Spin Alignment of Galaxies with the Large-scale Tidal Field in Hydrodynamic Simulations

Abstract The correlation between the spins of dark matter halos and the large-scale structure (LSS) has been studied in great detail over a large redshift range, while investigations of galaxies are still incomplete. Motivated by this point, we use the state-of-the-art hydrodynamic simulation, Illustris-1, to investigate mainly the spin–LSS correlation of galaxies at a redshift of z = 0. We mainly find that the spins of low-mass, blue, oblate galaxies are preferentially aligned with the slowest collapsing direction ( ) of the large-scale tidal field, while massive, red, prolate galaxy spins tend to be perpendicular to . The transition from a parallel to a perpendicular trend occurs at ∼109.4 h −1 M ⊙ in the stellar mass, ∼0.62 in the g–r color, and ∼0.4 in triaxiality. The transition stellar mass decreases with increasing redshifts. The alignment was found to be primarily correlated with the galaxy stellar mass. Our results are consistent with previous studies both in N-body simulations and observations. Our study also fills the vacancy in the study of the galaxy spin–LSS correlation at z = 0 using hydrodynamical simulations and also provides important insight to understand the formation and evolution of galaxy angular momentum.

Galaxy orientation with the cosmic web across cosmic time

This work investigates the alignment of galactic spins with the cosmic web across cosmic time using the cosmological hydrodynamical simulation Horizon-AGN. The cosmic web structure is extracted via the persistent skeleton as implemented in the DISPERSE algorithm. It is found that the spin of low-mass galaxies is more likely to be aligned with the filaments of the cosmic web and to lie within the plane of the walls while more massive galaxies tend to have a spin perpendicular to the axis of the filaments and to the walls. The mass transition is detected with a significance of 9 sigmas. This galactic alignment is consistent with the alignment of the spin of dark haloes found in pure dark matter simulations and with predictions from (anisotropic) tidal torque theory. However, unlike haloes, the alignment of low-mass galaxies is weak and disappears at low redshifts while the orthogonal spin orientation of massive galaxies is strong and increases with time, probably as a result of mergers. At fixed mass, alignments are correlated with galaxy morphology: the high-redshift alignment is dominated by spiral galaxies while elliptical centrals are mainly responsible for the perpendicular signal. These predictions for spin alignments with respect to cosmic filaments and unprecendently walls are successfully compared with existing observations. The alignment of the shape of galaxies with the different components of the cosmic web is also investigated. A coherent and stronger signal is found in terms of shape at high mass. The two regimes probed in this work induce competing galactic alignment signals for weak lensing, with opposite redshift and luminosity evolution. Understanding the details of these intrinsic alignments will be key to exploit future major cosmic shear surveys like Euclid or LSST.

Intrinsic galaxy alignment from angular dependent primordial non-Gaussianity

In this paper, we explore a detectable imprint of massive fields with integer spins s ⩾ 2, which may be predicted from string theory. It was shown that such a massive non-zero spin field can generate the squeezed primordial bispectrum which depends on the angle between the two wavenumbers. We show that considering the contribution from the massive spin-2 field, the angular dependent primordial non-Gaussianity (PNG) yields a strong scale dependence in the bias parameter for the galaxy alignment, which becomes prominent at small scales. As another example of an angular dependent PNG, we also consider the primordial bispectrum where the angular dependence was introduced by a vector field, while breaking the global rotational symmetry. As a consequence, we find that the B-mode cosmic shear and non-diagonal components do not vanish. These aspects provide qualitative differences from the PNG sourced by massive non-zero spin fields.

Discovery of the Kinematic Alignment of Early-type Galaxies in the Virgo Cluster

Abstract Using the kinematic position angles (PAkin), an accurate indicator for the spin axis of a galaxy, obtained from the ATLAS3D integral-field-unit (IFU) spectroscopic data, we discovered that 57 Virgo early-type galaxies tend to prefer the specific PAkin values of 20° and 100°, suggesting that they are kinematically aligned with each other. These kinematic alignment angles are further associated with the directions of the two distinct axes of the Virgo cluster extending east–west and north–south, strongly suggesting that the two distinct axes are the filamentary structures within the cluster as a trace of infall patterns of galaxies. Given that the spin axis of a massive early-type galaxy does not change easily even in clusters from the hydrodynamic simulations, Virgo early-type galaxies are likely to fall into the cluster along the filamentary structures while maintaining their angular momentum. This implies that many early-type galaxies in clusters are formed in filaments via major mergers before subsequently falling into the cluster. Investigating the kinematic alignment in other clusters will allow us to understand the formation of galaxy clusters and early-type galaxies.

Giant Double Radio Source DA 240: Purveyor of Galaxies

Abstract Galaxies of stars are building blocks of the baryonic universe. Their composition, structure, and kinematics have been well studied, but details of their origins remain sketchy. The collapse of gas clouds, induced by external forces whereby gravity overcomes internal pressure to form stars, is the likely starting point. Among the perturbing initiators of galaxy formation, radio source beams (jets) are quite effective. Typically, a beam may spawn one galaxy, though instances of several aligned with the radio axis are known. Recently, we found an impressive 14 companions in the lobes of the giant radio galaxy DA 240, which we argue formed as the result of jet instigation. This conclusion is bolstered by the fact that the galaxy groups display Z-shaped symmetry with respect to the radio axis. There is some evidence for star formation among the aligned companions. We also conclude that galaxy alignments at low redshift may derive from line-emitting gas observed in radio components of high-redshift galaxies.

Detection of Intrinsic Spin Alignments in Isolated Spiral Pairs

Abstract Observational evidence for 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 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. Several possible sources of this apparent inconsistency between the observational and the numerical results are discussed.

Projected alignment of non-sphericities of stellar, gas, and dark matter distributions in galaxy clusters: analysis of the Horizon-AGN simulation

While various observations measured ellipticities of galaxy clusters and alignments between orientations of the brightest cluster galaxies and their host clusters, there are only a handful of numerical simulations that implement realistic baryon physics to allow direct comparisons with those observations. Here we investigate ellipticities of galaxy clusters and alignments between various components of them and the central galaxies in the state-of-the-art cosmological hydrodynamical simulation Horizon-AGN, which contains dark matter, stellar, and gas components in a large simulation box of $(100 h^{-1}$ Mpc$)^3$ with high spatial resolution ($\sim1$ kpc). We estimate ellipticities of total matter, dark matter, stellar, gas surface mass density distributions, X-ray surface brightness, and the Compton $y$-parameter of the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect, as well as alignments between these components and the central galaxies for 120 projected images of galaxy clusters with masses $M_{200}>5\times10^{13}M_{\odot}$. Our results indicate that the distributions of these components are well aligned with the major-axes of the central galaxies, with the root mean square value of differences of their position angles of $\sim 20^\circ$, which vary little from inner to the outer regions. We also estimate alignments of these various components with total matter distributions, and find tighter alignments than those for central galaxies with the root mean square value of $\sim 15^\circ$. We compare our results with previous observations of ellipticities and position angle alignments and find reasonable agreements. The comprehensive analysis presented in this paper provides useful prior information for analyzing stacked lensing signals as well as designing future observations to study ellipticities and alignments of galaxy clusters.

Full-sky Ray-tracing Simulation of Weak Lensing Using ELUCID Simulations: Exploring Galaxy Intrinsic Alignment and Cosmic Shear Correlations

Abstract The intrinsic alignment of galaxies is an important systematic effect in weak-lensing surveys, which can affect the derived cosmological parameters. One direct way to distinguish different alignment models and quantify their effects on the measurement is to produce mock weak-lensing surveys. In this work, we use the full-sky ray-tracing technique to produce mock images of galaxies from the ELUCID N-body simulation run with WMAP9 cosmology. In our model, we assume that the shape of the central elliptical galaxy follows that of the dark matter halo, and that of the spiral galaxy follows the halo spin. Using the mock galaxy images, a combination of galaxy intrinsic shape and the gravitational shear, we compare the predicted tomographic shear correlations to the results of the Kilo-Degree Survey (KiDS) and Deep Lens Survey (DLS). We find that our predictions stay between the KiDS and DLS results. We rule out a model in which the satellite galaxies are radially aligned with the center galaxy; otherwise, the shear correlations on small scales are too high. Most importantly, we find that although the intrinsic alignment of spiral galaxies is very weak, they induce a positive correlation between the gravitational shear signal and the intrinsic galaxy orientation (GI). This is because the spiral galaxy is tangentially aligned with the nearby large-scale overdensity, contrary to the radial alignment of the elliptical galaxy. Our results explain the origin of the detected positive GI term in the weak-lensing surveys. We conclude that in future analyses, the GI model must include the dependence on galaxy types in more detail.

KiDS-450: cosmological constraints from weak lensing peak statistics – I. Inference from analytical prediction of high signal-to-noise ratio convergence peaks

This paper is the first of a series of papers constraining cosmological parameters with weak lensing peak statistics using $\sim 450~\rm deg^2$ of imaging data from the Kilo Degree Survey (KiDS-450). We measure high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR: $\nu$) weak lensing convergence peaks in the range of $3<\nu<5$, and employ theoretical models to derive expected values. These models are validated using a suite of simulations. We take into account two major systematic effects, the boost factor and the effect of baryons on the mass-concentration relation of dark matter haloes. In addition, we investigate the impacts of other potential astrophysical systematics including the projection effects of large scale structures, intrinsic galaxy alignments, as well as residual measurement uncertainties in the shear and redshift calibration. Assuming a flat $\Lambda$CDM model, we find constraints for $S_{\rm 8}=\sigma_{\rm 8}(\Omega_{\rm m}/0.3)^{0.5}=0.746^{+0.046}_{-0.107}$ according to the degeneracy direction of the cosmic shear analysis and $\Sigma_{\rm 8}=\sigma_{\rm 8}(\Omega_{\rm m}/0.3)^{0.38}=0.696^{+0.048}_{-0.050}$ based on the derived degeneracy direction of our high-SNR peak statistics. The difference between the power index of $S_{\rm 8}$ and in $\Sigma_{\rm 8}$ indicates that combining the two probes has the potential to break the degeneracy in $\sigma_{\rm 8}$ and $\Omega_{\rm m}$. Our results are consistent with the cosmic shear tomographic correlation analysis of the same dataset and $\sim 2\sigma$ lower than the Planck 2016 results.

A plane of high-velocity galaxies across the Local Group

We recently showed that several Local Group (LG) galaxies have much higher radial velocities (RVs) than predicted by a 3D dynamical model of the standard cosmological paradigm. Here, we show that 6 of these 7 galaxies define a thin plane with root mean square thickness of only 101 kpc despite a widest extent of nearly 3 Mpc, much larger than the conventional virial radius of the Milky Way (MW) or M31. This plane passes within ${\sim 70}$ kpc of the MW-M31 barycentre and is oriented so the MW-M31 line is inclined by $16^\circ$ to it. We develop a toy model to constrain the scenario whereby a past MW-M31 flyby in Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) forms tidal dwarf galaxies that settle into the recently discovered planes of satellites around the MW and M31. The scenario is viable only for a particular MW-M31 orbital plane. This roughly coincides with the plane of LG dwarfs with anomalously high RVs. Using a restricted $N$-body simulation of the LG in MOND, we show how the once fast-moving MW and M31 gravitationally slingshot test particles outwards at high speeds. The most distant such particles preferentially lie within the MW-M31 orbital plane, probably because the particles ending up with the highest RVs are those flung out almost parallel to the motion of the perturber. This suggests a dynamical reason for our finding of a similar trend in the real LG, something not easily explained as a chance alignment of galaxies with an isotropic or mildly flattened distribution (probability $= {0.0015}$).

Effects of self-calibration of intrinsic alignment on cosmological parameter constraints from future cosmic shear surveys

Intrinsic alignments (IA) of galaxies have been recognized as one of the most serious contaminants to weak lensing. These systematics need to be isolated and mitigated in order for ongoing and future lensing surveys to reach their full potential. The IA self-calibration (SC) method was shown in previous studies to be able to reduce the GI contamination by up to a factor of 10 for the 2-point and 3-point correlations. The SC method does not require the assumption of an IA model in its working and can extract the GI signal from the same photo-z survey offering the possibility to test and understand structure formation scenarios and their relationship to IA models. In this paper, we study the effects of the IA SC mitigation method on the precision and accuracy of cosmological parameter constraints from future cosmic shear surveys LSST, WFIRST and Euclid. We perform analytical and numerical calculations to estimate the loss of precision and the residual bias in the best fit cosmological parameters after the self-calibration is performed. We take into account uncertainties from photometric redshifts and the galaxy bias. We find that the confidence contours are slightly inflated from applying the SC method itself while a significant increase is due to the inclusion of the photo-z uncertainties. The bias of cosmological parameters is reduced from several-σ, when IA is not corrected for, to below 1-σ after SC is applied. These numbers are comparable to those resulting from applying the method of marginalizing over IA model parameters despite the fact that the two methods operate very differently. We conclude that implementing the SC for these future cosmic-shear surveys will not only allow one to efficiently mitigate the GI contaminant but also help to understand their modeling and link to structure formation.

ZBEAMS: a unified solution for supernova cosmology with redshift uncertainties

Supernova cosmology without spectra will be an important component of future surveys such as LSST. This lack of supernova spectra results in uncertainty in the redshifts which, if ignored, leads to significantly biased estimates of cosmological parameters. Here we present a hierarchical Bayesian formalism— zBEAMS—that addresses this problem by marginalising over the unknown or uncertain supernova redshifts to produce unbiased cosmological estimates that are competitive with supernova data with spectroscopically confirmed redshifts. zBEAMS provides a unified treatment of both photometric redshifts and host galaxy misidentification (occurring due to chance galaxy alignments or faint hosts), effectively correcting the inevitable contamination in the Hubble diagram. Like its predecessor BEAMS, our formalism also takes care of non-Ia supernova contamination by marginalising over the unknown supernova type. We illustrate this technique with simulations of supernovae with photometric redshifts and host galaxy misidentification. A novel feature of the photometric redshift case is the important role played by the redshift distribution of the supernovae.