Intrinsic alignments of disc and elliptical galaxies in the MassiveBlack-II and Illustris simulations

Abstract

We study the shapes and intrinsic alignments of discs and elliptical galaxies in the MassiveBlack-II (MBII) and Illustris cosmological hydrodynamic simulations, with volumes of (100 <it>h</it>−1 Mpc)3 and (75 <it>h</it>−1 Mpc)3, respectively. We find that simulated disc galaxies are more oblate in shape and more misaligned with the shape of their host dark matter subhalo when compared with ellipticals. The disc major axis is found to be oriented towards the location of nearby elliptical galaxies. We also find that the discs are thinner in MBII and misalignments with dark matter halo orientations are smaller in both discs and ellipticals when compared with Illustris. As a result, the intrinsic alignment correlation functions at fixed mass have a higher amplitude in MBII than in Illustris. Finally, at scales above ∼0.1 <it>h</it>−1 Mpc, the intrinsic alignment two-point correlation functions for disc galaxies in both simulations are consistent with a null detection, unlike those for ellipticals. Despite significant differences in the treatments of hydrodynamics and baryonic physics in the simulations, we find that the <it>w</it><inf>δ +</inf> correlation function scales similarly with transverse separation. However, the less massive galaxies show different scale dependence in the ellipticity-direction correlation. This result indicates that, while hydrodynamic simulations are a promising tool to study intrinsic alignments, further study is needed to understand the impact of differences in the implementations of hydrodynamics and baryonic feedback.