Intrinsic Alignments in Large-Scale Structure Dynamics
Summary
Intrinsic alignments describe the tendency of galaxies and their host haloes to orient coherently under the influence of the same large-scale tidal gravitational field. This effect arises when neighbouring protogalaxies acquire correlated angular momenta or shapes during their formation, leading to alignments with filaments, sheets and voids in the cosmic web. Intrinsic alignments are both a valuable probe of galaxy formation physics and a major systematic in weak gravitational-lensing surveys, where they can mimic or contaminate the shear signal induced by foreground mass. Recent advances draw on deep imaging, wide-area spectroscopy and cosmological hydrodynamic simulations to quantify the scale and mass dependence of these correlations, revealing a strong sensitivity to halo mass, galaxy morphology and environment. Understanding intrinsic alignments is therefore essential to refine models of structure growth, to calibrate cosmological parameters from lensing data and to uncover the history of angular-momentum acquisition in galaxies.
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Intrinsic Alignments in Large-Scale Structure Dynamics publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in intrinsic alignments in large-scale structure dynamics across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Intrinsic alignment (IA): Correlated orientations of galaxy shapes or spins induced by shared large-scale tidal fields.
Cosmic shear: Weak gravitational-lensing distortion of background galaxies by the intervening matter distribution.
Dark-matter halo: Gravitationally bound, predominantly dark structure that hosts galaxies and governs their dynamics.
Tidal torque theory: Framework describing how torques from the surrounding density field impart angular momentum to protogalaxies.
Two-point correlation function: Statistical measure of the excess probability of finding pairs of objects as a function of separation, used to quantify alignments.
References
- Tilted Dark Halos Are Common and Long-lived, and Can Warp Galactic Disks. The Astrophysical Journal Letters (2023).
- Shape, alignment, and mass distribution of baryonic and dark-matter halos in one EAGLE simulation. Astronomy & Astrophysics (2023).
- Mass Dependence of Galaxy–Halo Alignment in LOWZ and CMASS. The Astrophysical Journal (2023).
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