New method of investigation of the alignment of galaxies

Włodzimierz Godłowski, Paulina Pajowska and Joanna Popiela

The aim of modern extragalactic astronomy and cosmology which play an important part is the problem of structures formation. Investigating the orientation of galaxies is a standard test for scenarios of galaxy formation since different theories of galaxy formation make various predictions regarding to the angular momentum of galaxies. A new method of analysing the galaxies alignment in clusters was proposed by Godłowski (2012). Now this method was improved and not only the distribution of position angles for galaxy major axes was analysed, but in addition the distribution of the two angles describing the spatial orientation of the galaxy plane. We analysed the orientation of galaxies in 247 Abell rich galaxy clusters taken from Panko & Flin (2006) catalogue of galaxy clusters. We found that the orientations of galaxies in analysed clusters are not random. It means that we confirmed an existence of the alignment of galaxies in rich Abells' galaxy clusters genuinely. The implications of this results were discussed with reference to theories of galaxy formation as well.

Proceedings of the Polish Astronomical Society, vol. 3, 223-228 (2016)

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