Focus Meeting: Galactic Angular Momentum

Galactic Disk Formation and the Angular Momentum Problem

Galactic disk formation requires knowledge about the initial conditions under which disk galaxies form, the boundary conditions that affect their secular evolution and the micro-physical processes that drive the multi-phase interstellar medium and regulate their star formation history. Most of these ingredients are still poorly understood. Recent high-resolution observations of young high-redsh...

A Universal Angular Momentum Profile for Galactic Halos

We study the angular-momentum profiles of a statistical sample of halos drawn from a high-resolution N -body simulation of the ΛCDM cosmology. We find that the cumulative mass distribution of specific angular momentum j in a halo of mass Mv is well fit by a universal function, M(< j) = Mvμj/(j0+ j). This profile is defined by one shape parameter (μ or j0) in addition to the global spin paramete...

Self-gravity and Angular Momentum Transport in Extended Galactic Disks

We demonstrate a significant difference in the angular momentum transport properties of galactic disks between regions in which the interstellar medium is single phase or two phase. Our study is motivated by observations of H I in extended galactic disks which indicate velocity dispersions of nonthermal origin, suggesting that turbulence in the gas may be contributing significantly to the obser...

Review: galactic angular momenta and angular momentum correlations in the cosmological large-scale structure

I review the theory of angular momentum acquisition of galaxies by tidal torquing, the resulting angular momentum distribution, the angular momentum correlation function and discuss the implications of angular momentum alignments on weak lensing measurements: Starting from linear models for tidal torquing I summarise perturbative approaches and the results from n-body simulations of cosmic stru...

Angular Momentum