No Arabic abstract
The puzzling correlation between the spin parameter lambda of galactic disks and the disk-to-halo mass fraction fdisk is investigated. We show that such a correlation arises naturally from uncertainties in determining the virial masses of dark matter halos. This result leads to the conclusion that the halo properties derived from fits to observed rotation curves are still very uncertain which might explain part of the disagreements between cosmological models and observations. We analyse lambda and fdisk as function of the adopted halo virial mass. Reasonable halo concentrations require fdisk=0.01-0.07 which is significantly smaller than the universal baryon fraction. Most of the available gas either never settled into the galactic disks or was ejected subsequently. In both cases it is not very surprising that the specific angular momentum distribution of galactic disks does not agree with the cosmological predictions which neglect these effects.
We examine a magnitude limited (M_B< -18.7) sample of post-starburst (PSB) galaxies at 0.03<z<0.11 in the different environments from the spectroscopic data set of the Padova Millennium Galaxy Group Catalog and compare their incidence and properties with those of passive (PAS) and emission line galaxies (EML). PSB galaxies have a quite precise life-time (<1-1.5 Gyr), and they hold important clues for understanding galaxy evolution. While the properties (stellar mass, absolute magnitude, color) of PSBs do not depend on environment, their frequency increases going from single galaxies to binary systems to groups, both considering the incidence with respect to the global number of galaxies and to the number of currently+recently star-forming galaxies. Including in our analysis the sample of cluster PSBs drawn from the WIde-field Nearby Galaxy-cluster Survey presented in Paccagnella et al., we extend the halo mass range covered and present a coherent picture of the effect of the environment on galaxy transformations. We find that the PSB/(PSB+EML) fraction steadily increases with halo mass going from 1% in 10^{11} M_sun$ haloes to ~15% in the most massive haloes (10^{15.5} M_sun). This provides evidence that processes specific to the densest environments, such as ram pressure stripping, are responsible for a large fraction of PSB galaxies in dense environments. These processes act on a larger fraction of galaxies than alternative processes leading to PSB galaxies in the sparsest environments, such as galaxy interactions.
The MareNostrum Universe is one of the largest cosmological SPH simulation done so far. It consists of $1024^3$ dark and $1024^3$ gas particles in a box of 500 $h^{-1}$ Mpc on a side. Here we study the shapes and spins of the dark matter and gas components of the 10,000 most massive objects extracted from the simulation as well as the gas fraction in those objects. We find that the shapes of objects tend to be prolate both in the dark matter and gas. There is a clear dependence of shape on halo mass, the more massive ones being less spherical than the less massive objects. The gas distribution is nevertheless much more spherical than the dark matter, although the triaxiality parameters of gas and dark matter differ only by a few percent and it increases with cluster mass. The spin parameters of gas and dark matter can be well fitted by a lognormal distribution function. On average, the spin of gas is 1.4 larger than the spin of dark matter. We find a similar behavior for the spins at higher redshifts, with a slightly decrease of the spin ratios to 1.16 at $z=1.$ The cosmic normalized baryon fraction in the entire cluster sample ranges from $Y_b = 0.94$, at $z=1$ to $Y_b = 0.92$ at $z=0$. At both redshifts we find a slightly, but statistically significant decrease of $Y_b$ with cluster mass.
Surface-brightness profiles for early-type (S0-Sb) disks exhibit three main classes (Type I, II, and III). Type II profiles are more common in barred galaxies, and most of the time appear to be related to the bars Outer Lindblad Resonance. Roughly half of barred galaxies in the field have Type II profiles, but almost none in the Virgo Cluster do; this might be related to ram-pressure stripping in clusters. A strong textit{anti}correlation is found between Type III profiles (antitruncations) and bars: Type III profiles are most common when there is no bar, and least common when there is a strong bar.
We investigate the baryon fraction in dark matter haloes formed in non-radiative gas-dynamical simulations of the LambdaCDM cosmogony. By combining a realisation of the Millennium Simulation (Springel et al.) with a simulation of a smaller volume focussing on dwarf haloes, our study spans five decades in halo mass, from 10^10 Msun/h to 10^15 Msun/h. We find that the baryon fraction within the halo virial radius is typically 90% of the cosmic mean, with an rms scatter of 6%, independently of redshift and of halo mass down to the smallest resolved haloes. Our results show that, contrary to the proposal of Mo et al. (2005), pre-virialisation gravitational heating is unable to prevent the collapse of gas within galactic and proto-galactic haloes, and confirm the need for non-gravitational feedback in order to reduce the efficiency of gas cooling and star formation in dwarf galaxy haloes. Simulations including a simple photoheating model (where a gas temperature floor of T_{floor} = 2x10^4 K is imposed from z=11) confirm earlier suggestions that photoheating can only prevent the collapse of baryons in systems with virial temperatures T_{200} < ~2.2 T_{floor} ~ 4.4x10^4 K (corresponding to a virial mass of M_{200} ~ 10^10 Msun/h and a circular velocity of V_{200} ~ 35 km/s). Photoheating may thus help regulate the formation of dwarf spheroidals and other galaxies at the extreme faint-end of the luminosity function, but it cannot, on its own, reconcile the abundance of sub-L* galaxies with the vast number of dwarf haloes expected in the LambdaCDM cosmogony. The lack of evolution or mass dependence seen in the baryon fraction augurs well for X-ray cluster studies that assume a universal and non-evolving baryon fraction to place constraints on cosmological parameters.
We present the first results of our pilot study of 8 photometrically selected Lyman continuum (LyC) emitting galaxy candidates from the COSMOS field and focus on their optical emission line ratios. Observations were performed in the H and K bands using the Multi-Object Spectrometer for Infra-Red Exploration (MOSFIRE) instrument at the Keck Observatory, targeting the [OII], H$beta$, and [OIII] emission lines. We find that photometrically selected LyC emitting galaxy candidates have high ionization parameters, based on their high [OIII]/[OII] ratios (O32), with an average ratio for our sample of 2.5$pm$0.2. Preliminary results of our companion Low Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (LRIS) observations, targeting LyC and Ly$alpha$, show that those galaxies with the largest O32 are typically found to also be Ly$alpha$ emitters. High O32 galaxies are also found to have tentative non-zero LyC escape fractions ($f_{esc}(LyC)$) based on $u$ band photometric detections. These results are consistent with samples of highly ionized galaxies, including confirmed LyC emitting galaxies from the literature. We also perform a detailed comparison between the observed emission line ratios and simulated line ratios from density bounded H$_{textrm{II}}$ regions modeled using the photoionization code MAPPINGS V. Estimates of $f_{esc}(LyC)$ for our sample fall in the range from 0.0-0.23 and suggest possible tension with published correlations between O32 and $f_{esc}(LyC)$, adding weight to dichotomy of arguments in the literature. We highlight the possible effects of clumpy geometry and mergers that may account for such tension.