A large-scale hydrodynamical cosmological simulation, Horizon-AGN , is used to investigate the alignment between the spin of galaxies and the cosmic filaments above redshift 1.2. The analysis of more than 150 000 galaxies per time step in the redshift range 1.2 < z < 1.8 with morphological diversity shows that the spin of low-mass blue galaxies is preferentially aligned with their neighbouring filaments, while high-mass red galaxies tend to have a perpendicular spin. The reorientation of the spin of massive galaxies is provided by galaxy mergers, which are significant in their mass build-up. We find that the stellar mass transition from alignment to misalignment happens around 3 × 10 10 M ⊙ . Galaxies form in the vorticity-rich neighbourhood of filaments, and migrate towards the nodes of the cosmic web as they convert their orbital angular momentum into spin. The signature of this process can be traced to the properties of galaxies, as measured relative to the cosmic web. We argue that a strong source of feedback such as active galactic nuclei is mandatory to quench in situ star formation in massive galaxies and promote various morphologies. It allows mergers to play their key role by reducing post-merger gas inflows and, therefore, keeping spins misaligned with cosmic filaments.
We investigate the alignment of the spin of dark matter haloes relative (i) to the surrounding large-scale filamentary structure, and (ii) to the tidal tensor eigenvectors using the Horizon 4π dark matter simulation which resolves over 43 million dark matter haloes at redshift zero. We detect a clear mass transition: the spin of dark matter haloes above a critical mass M s 0 ≈ 5(±1) × 10 12 M tends to be perpendicular to the closest large-scale filament (with an excess probability of up to 12 per cent), and aligned with the intermediate axis of the tidal tensor (with an excess probability of up to 40 per cent), whereas the spin of low-mass haloes is more likely to be aligned with the closest filament (with an excess probability of up to 15 per cent). Furthermore, this critical mass is redshift-dependent, scaling as M s crit (z) ≈ M s 0 (1 + z) −γ s with γ s = 2.5 ± 0.2. A similar fit for the redshift evolution of the tidal tensor transition mass yields M t 0 ≈ 8(±2) × 10 12 M and γ t = 3 ± 0.3. This critical mass also varies weakly with the scale defining filaments.We propose an interpretation of this signal in terms of large-scale cosmic flows. In this picture, most low-mass haloes are formed through the winding of flows embedded in misaligned walls; hence, they acquire a spin parallel to the axis of the resulting filaments forming at the intersection of these walls. On the other hand, more massive haloes are typically the products of later mergers along such filaments, and thus they acquire a spin perpendicular to this direction when their orbital angular momentum is converted into spin. We show that this scenario is consistent with both measured excess probabilities of alignment with respect to the eigendirections of the tidal tensor, and halo merger histories. On a more qualitative level, it also seems compatible with 3D visualization of the structure of the cosmic web as traced by 'smoothed' dark matter simulations or gas tracer particles. Finally, it provides extra support to the disc-forming paradigm presented by Pichon et al. as it extends it by characterizing the geometry of secondary infall at high redshift.
We present a specific prescription for the calculation of cosmological power spectra, exploited here at two-loop order in perturbation theory (PT), based on the multi-point propagator expansion. In this approach power spectra are constructed from the regularized expressions of the propagators that reproduce both the resummed behavior in the high-k limit and the standard PT results at low-k. With the help of N -body simulations, we show that such a construction gives robust and accurate predictions for both the density power spectrum and the correlation function at percent-level in the weakly non-linear regime. We then present an algorithm that allows accelerated evaluations of all the required diagrams by reducing the computational tasks to one-dimensional integrals. This is achieved by means of pre-computed kernel sets defined for appropriately chosen fiducial models. The computational time for two-loop results is then reduced from a few minutes, with the direct method, to a few seconds with the fast one. The robustness and applicability of this method are tested against the power spectrum cosmic emulator from which a wide variety of cosmological models can be explored. The fortran program with which direct and fast calculations of power spectra can be done, RegPT, is publicly released as part of this paper.
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