Title:　  The spin of late-type galaxies at high redshift

Speaker:　 Dr. Bernardo Cervantes Sodi

Time:   Mar. 15, Thursday, 2pm

Location: 1714

Abstract:
　　 We study the evolution of the galactic spin using data of high redshift galaxies in the fields of the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS). Through simple dynamical considerations we estimate the spin for the disc galaxies in our sample and find that its distribution is consistent with that found for nearby galaxies. Defining a dimensionless angular momentum parameter for the disc component of the galaxies ($\lambda_{d}$), we do not find signs of evolution in the redshift range 0.4 <= z <= 1.2. We find that the galaxies in our sample follow the same relationships between spin and mass and spin and environment as low redshift galaxies do; showing a strong dependence on mass, in the sense that low-mass systems present higher $\lambda_{d}$ values than high-mass galaxies, with no significant dependence on the environmental density. These results lead us to conclude that, although individual disc galaxies might occasionally suffer strong evolution from $z \sim 1$ to the present day, they evolve in such a way that the overall spin distribution of the galactic population remains constant.