On the Intrinsic Alignments of the Late-Type Spiral Galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 7

Abstract

A robust detection of the tidally induced intrinsic alignments of the late-type spiral galaxies with high statistical significance is reported. From the spectroscopic galaxy sample of SDSS DR7 compiled by Huertas-Company et al. which lists each galaxy's probabilities of being in five Hubble types, P(E),P(Ell), P(S0),P(Sab), P(Scd), we select the nearby large late-type spiral galaxies which have redshifts of 0=0.5 and angular sizes of D>=7.92 arcsec. The spin axes of the selected nearby large late-type spiral galaxies are determined up to the two-fold ambiguity with the help of the circular thin-disk approximation and their spatial correlations are measured as a function of the separation distance r. A clear signal of the intrinsic correlation as high as 3.4 sigma and 2.4 sigma is found at the separation distance of r~1Mpc/h and r~2Mpc/h, respectively. The comparison of this observational results with the analytic model based on the tidal torque theory reveals that the spin correlation function for the late-type spiral galaxies follow the quadratic scaling of the linear density correlation and that the intrinsic correlations of the galaxy spin axes are stronger than that of the underlying dark halos. We investigate a local density dependence of the galaxy spin correlations and found that the correlations are stronger for the galaxies located in dense regions having more than 10 neighbors within 2Mpc/h. We also attempt to measure a luminosity dependence of the galaxy spin correlations, but find that it is impossible with our magnitude-split samples to disentangle a luminosity from a redshift dependence. We provide the physical explanations for these observational results and also discuss the effects of possible residual systematics on the results.Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ, revised version, The angular size cut on the late-type spiral galaxies is additionally applied, the quadractic scaling with the linear density field is found to work better when the angular size cut is applied. Those galaxies located in denser regions are found to be strongly correlate