The SAMI Galaxy Survey: The link between angular momentum and optical morphology ...

• Main Authors: Cortese, Luca, Fogarty, L. M.R., Bekki, K., van de Sande, J., Couch, Warrick, Catinella, Barbara, Colless, M., Obreschkow, D., Taranu, D., Tescari, E., Barat, D., Bland-Hawthorn, J., Bloom, J., Bryant, J. J., Cluver, Michelle, Croom, S. M., Drinkwater, M. J., d'Eugenio, F., Konstantopoulos, I. S., Lopez-Sanchez, A., Mahajan, S., Scott, N., Tonini, C., Wong, O. I., Allen, J. T., Brough, S., Goodwin, M., Green, A. W., Ho, I. T., Kelvin, L. S., Lawrence, J. S., Lorente, N. P.F., Medling, A. M., Owers, M. S., Richards, S., Sharp, R., Sweet, Sarah
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: Swinburne 2024
• Subjects: Cosmology and extragalactic astronomy; sami
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.25916/sut.26244569.v1; https://figshare.swinburne.edu.au/articles/journal_contribution/The_SAMI_Galaxy_Survey_The_link_between_angular_momentum_and_optical_morphology/26244569/1

We investigate the relationship between stellar and gas specific angular momentum j, stellar massM* and optical morphology for a sample of 488 galaxies extracted from the Sydney-AAO Multi-object Integral field Galaxy Survey.We find that j, measured within one effective radius, monotonically increases with M* and that, for M* > 109.5 M⊙, the scatter in this relation strongly correlates with optical morphology (i.e. visual classification and Sérsic index). These findings confirm that massive galaxies of all types lie on a plane relating mass, angular momentum and stellar-light distribution, and suggest that the large-scale morphology of a galaxy is regulated by its mass and dynamical state. We show that the significant scatter in the M*-j relation is accounted for by the fact that, at fixed stellar mass, the contribution of ordered motions to the dynamical support of galaxies varies by at least a factor of 3. Indeed, the stellar spin parameter (quantified via λR) correlates strongly with Sérsic and ...