Gas Morphology of Milky Way-like Galaxies in the TNG50 Simulation: Signals of Twisting and Stretching

Kavli Affiliate: Mark Vogelsberger

| First 5 Authors: Thomas K. Waters, Colton Peterson, Razieh Emami, Xuejian Shen, Lars Hernquist

| Summary:

We present an in-depth analysis of gas morphologies for a sample of 25 Milky
Way-like galaxies from the IllustrisTNG TNG50 simulation. We constrain the
morphology of cold, warm, hot gas, and gas particles as a whole using a Local
Shell Iterative Method (LSIM) and explore its observational implications by
computing the hard-to-soft X-ray ratio, which ranges between
$10^{-3}$-$10^{-2}$ in the inner $sim 50 rm kpc$ of the distribution and
$10^{-5}$-$10^{-4}$ at the outer portion of the hot gas distribution. We group
galaxies into three main categories: simple, stretched, and twisted. These
categories are based on the radial reorientation of the principal axes of the
reduced inertia tensor. We find that a vast majority ($77%$) of the galaxies
in our sample exhibit twisting patterns in their radial profiles. Additionally,
we present detailed comparisons between 1) the gaseous distributions belonging
to individual temperature regimes, 2) the cold gas distributions and stellar
distributions, and 3) the gaseous distributions and dark matter (DM) halos. We
find a strong correlation between the morphological properties of the cold gas
and stellar distributions. Furthermore, we find a correlation between gaseous
distributions with DM halo that increases with gas temperature, implying that
we may use the warm-hot gaseous morphology as a tracer to probe the DM
morphology. Finally, we show gaseous distributions exhibit significantly more
prolate morphologies than the stellar distributions and DM halos, which we
hypothesize is due to stellar and AGN feedback.

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