An Observed Evidence for the Primordial Origin of Galaxy Sizes

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Moon, Jun-Sung, Lee, Jounghun
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866909866846584832
author Moon, Jun-Sung
Lee, Jounghun
author_facet Moon, Jun-Sung
Lee, Jounghun
contents We present an observational evidence supporting the scenario that the protogalactic angular momenta play an important role in molding the optical sizes of present galaxies. Analyzing the NASA-Sloan Atlas catalog in the redshift range of $0.02\le z<0.09$, we observationally determine the probability density distributions, $p(r_{50})$ and $p(r_{90})$, where $r_{50}$ and $r_{90}$ denote the galaxy sizes enclosing $50\%$ and $90\%$ of their $r$-band luminosities, respectively. Both of the distributions are found to be well described by a bimodal Gamma mixture model, which is consistent with the recent numerical results. Classifying the local galaxies by their ratios, $r_{50}/r_{90}$, we also show that for the case of late-type galaxies with $r_{50}/r_{90}\ge 0.45$ both of $p(r_{50})$ and $p(r_{90})$ exhibit no bimodal feature, following a unimodal Gamma model. Assuming the existence of a linear causal correlation between $\{r_{50},r_{90}\}$ of the late-type galaxies and the primordial spin factor, $τ$, defined as the degree of misalignments between the initial tidal and protogalaxy inertia tensors, we reconstruct the probability density distributions, $p(τ)$, directly from the observationally determined $p(r_{50})$ and $p(r_{90})$ of the late-type galaxies. It is shown that the reconstructed $p(τ)$ is in an excellent agreement with the real distribution of $τ$ that was determined at the protogalactic stages by numerical experiments. A critical implication of our result on reconstructing the initial conditions from observable galaxy sizes is discussed.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_00520
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle An Observed Evidence for the Primordial Origin of Galaxy Sizes
Moon, Jun-Sung
Lee, Jounghun
Astrophysics of Galaxies
Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics
We present an observational evidence supporting the scenario that the protogalactic angular momenta play an important role in molding the optical sizes of present galaxies. Analyzing the NASA-Sloan Atlas catalog in the redshift range of $0.02\le z<0.09$, we observationally determine the probability density distributions, $p(r_{50})$ and $p(r_{90})$, where $r_{50}$ and $r_{90}$ denote the galaxy sizes enclosing $50\%$ and $90\%$ of their $r$-band luminosities, respectively. Both of the distributions are found to be well described by a bimodal Gamma mixture model, which is consistent with the recent numerical results. Classifying the local galaxies by their ratios, $r_{50}/r_{90}$, we also show that for the case of late-type galaxies with $r_{50}/r_{90}\ge 0.45$ both of $p(r_{50})$ and $p(r_{90})$ exhibit no bimodal feature, following a unimodal Gamma model. Assuming the existence of a linear causal correlation between $\{r_{50},r_{90}\}$ of the late-type galaxies and the primordial spin factor, $τ$, defined as the degree of misalignments between the initial tidal and protogalaxy inertia tensors, we reconstruct the probability density distributions, $p(τ)$, directly from the observationally determined $p(r_{50})$ and $p(r_{90})$ of the late-type galaxies. It is shown that the reconstructed $p(τ)$ is in an excellent agreement with the real distribution of $τ$ that was determined at the protogalactic stages by numerical experiments. A critical implication of our result on reconstructing the initial conditions from observable galaxy sizes is discussed.
title An Observed Evidence for the Primordial Origin of Galaxy Sizes
topic Astrophysics of Galaxies
Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00520