2008/02/29 by Zachory K. Berta-Thompson, Zachory K. Berta, Raúl Jiménez +4 · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2966.2008.13742.x
Accepted to MNRAS after moderate revision
arxiv created 2008/09/18 · openalex publication_date 2008/11/11 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Using the Sloan Digital Sky Survey spectroscopic sample, we estimate the dark matter halo spin parameter λ for ∼52 000 disc galaxies for which moped star formation histories are available. We investigate the relationship between spin and total stellar mass, star formation history and environment. First, we find a clear anticorrelation between stellar mass and spin, with low-mass galaxies generally having high dark matter spins. Secondly, galaxies which have formed more than ∼5 per cent of their stars in the last 0.2 Gyr have more broadly distributed and typically higher spins (including a significant fraction with λ > 0.1) than galaxies which formed a large fraction of their stars more than 10 Gyr ago. Finally, we find little or no correlation between the value of spin of the dark halo and environment as determined both by proximity to a new cluster catalogue and a marked correlation study. This agrees well with the predictions from the linear hierarchical torquing theory and numerical simulations.