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The angular momentum of cold dark matter haloes with and without baryons

Journal

MONTHLY NOTICES OF THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY
Volume 404, Issue 3, Pages 1137-1156

Publisher

OXFORD UNIV PRESS
DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2966.2010.16368.x

Keywords

methods: N-body simulations; galaxies: haloes; dark matter

Funding

  1. Science & Technology Facilities Council (STFC)
  2. Helmholtz Alliance [HA-101]
  3. Royal Society
  4. MEXT [16002003]
  5. JSPS [20224002]
  6. Science and Technology Facilities Council [ST/H008519/1, ST/F002289/1] Funding Source: researchfish
  7. STFC [ST/H008519/1, ST/F002289/1] Funding Source: UKRI

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We investigate the magnitude and internal alignment of the angular momentum of cold dark matter haloes in simulations with and without baryons. We analyse the cumulative angular momentum profiles of hundreds of thousands of well-resolved haloes in the Millennium Simulation of Springel et al. and in a smaller, but higher resolution, simulation, in total spanning 5 orders of magnitude in mass. For haloes of a given mass, the median specific angular momentum increases with radius as j(< r) proportional to r. The direction of the vector varies considerably with radius: the median angle between the inner (less than or similar to 0.25R(vir)) and total (< R-vir) angular momentum vectors is about 25 degrees. To investigate how baryons affect halo spin, we use another high-resolution simulation, which includes gas cooling, star formation and feedback. This simulation produces a sample of galaxies with a realistic distribution of disc-to-total ratios, D/T: two-thirds of the galaxies have D/T > 0.5 in the B band. The formation of the galaxy spins up the dark matter within 0.1R(vir) such that the specific halo angular momentum increases by approximate to 50 per cent in the median. The dark matter angular momentum becomes better aligned, but there remains a broad distribution of (mis-)alignments between the halo and the central galaxy, with a median angle between their angular momenta of similar to 30 degrees. Galaxies have a range of orientations relative to the shape of the halo: half of them have their minor axes misaligned by more than 45 degrees, although only about 10 per cent of the galaxies lie within 30 degrees of the plane perpendicular to the major axis of their halo. Finally, we align a sample of haloes according to the orientation of their galaxies and stack the projected mass distributions. Although the individual haloes are significantly aspherical, galaxy-halo misalignments produce a stacked mass distribution that cannot be distinguished from circular. If the lack of alignment found in our simulations is realistic, it will be extremely difficult for weak lensing studies to measure the ellipticity of cold dark matter haloes using this technique.

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