Kinematic morphology of low-mass galaxies in IllustrisTNG

Abstract

The origin of diverse kinematic morphologies observed in low-mass galaxies is unclear. In this study, we investigate the kinematic morphologies of central galaxies with stellar mass 108.5 − 9.0M⊙ at z = 0 in the TNG50-1 cosmological simulation. The majority of the low-mass galaxies in TNG50-1 are dispersion-dominated, consistent with observations. By tracing the evolutionary histories of simulated low-mass galaxies, we find that while most stars form in rotating cold gas discs, the orientation of the star-forming discs relative to the galaxies may evolve with cosmic time. If the cold gas disc remains aligning with the galaxy during its evolution, stars formed at different times share the same rotational direction, leading to a rotation-dominated system. On the contrary, frequent misalignment of cold gas disc would result in a dispersion-dominated system. In addition, we also find that the two-body scattering can have a non-negligible numerical heating effect on the simulated galaxy morphology, especially at central regions of galaxies and for relatively low-mass galaxies. By comparing results of simulations with different resolutions, our results suggest that the simulated morphology of galaxies is roughly reliable when their number of stellar particles exceeds about 104, and bulge morphology of galaxies can not be resolved robustly at the resolution level of TNG50-1.