2020/10/31 by Marius Peper, Boudewijn F. Roukema · 8 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #Astrophysics #COSMIC cancer database #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Dark matter #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Galaxy #Galaxy formation and evolution #Halo #Physics #Void (composites) #astro-ph.CO #astro-ph.GA
paper · pdf · doi:10.1093/mnras/stab1342
published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 505(1), 1223-1238 (Oxford University Press) · 16 pages, 16 figures, 4 tables, reproducibility: zenodo.4699702 at https://zenodo.org/record/4699702, git: https://codeberg.org/boud/elaphrocentre ; v3: matches accepted version
openalex publication_date 2021/05/11 · arxiv created 2021/06/21 · arxiv updated 2021/06/22 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
ABSTRACT Voids may affect galaxy formation via weakening mass infall or increasing disk sizes, which could potentially play a role in the formation of giant low surface brightness galaxies (LSBGs). If a dark matter halo forms at the potential hill corresponding to a void of the cosmic web, which we denote the ‘elaphrocentre’ in contrast to a barycentre, then the elaphrocentre should weaken the infall rate to the halo when compared to infall rates towards barycentres. We investigate this hypothesis numerically. We present a complete software pipeline to simulate galaxy formation, starting from a power spectrum of initial perturbations and an N-body simulation through to merger-history-tree based mass infall histories. The pipeline is built from well-established, free-licensed cosmological software packages, and aims at highly portable long-term reproducibility. We find that the elaphrocentric accelerations tending to oppose mass infall are modest. We do not find evidence of location in a void or elaphrocentric position weakening mass infall towards a galaxy. However, we find indirect evidence of voids influencing galaxy formation: while void galaxies are of lower mass compared to galaxies in high-density environments, their spin parameters are typically higher. For a fixed mass, the implied disc scale length would be greater. Tangential accelerations in voids are found to be high and might significantly contribute to the higher spin parameters. We find significantly later formation epochs for void galaxies; this should give lower matter densities and may imply lower surface densities of disc galaxies. Thus, void galaxies have higher spin parameters and later formation epochs; both are factors that may increase the probability of forming LSBGs in voids.