Wednesday, September 28, 2016

angular momentum - Are the orientations of spin-axes and binary/planetary orbits random or is there any relationship with the Galactic plane?


In an answer to another question, a claim has been made that orbit/spin orientations are random (at least within our own Galaxy), except perhaps towards the Galactic centre.


I have dabbled in this area before ( http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2010MNRAS.402.1380J ) and there is a recent paper by Rees & Zijlstra (2013) that suggests planetary nebulae in the Galactic bulge with bipolar morphologies have an alignment with the Galactic plane at 3.7 sigma significance. The hypothesis is that this is due to an alignment of the orbital axes of their parent binary systems, such that the orbital planes of the binary systems are perpendicular to the Galactic plane.


My question: Is there any other evidence for such alignments in other classes of source in the bulge or elsewhere in the Galaxy? Or are there any studies that comprehensively show that angular momentum vectors (spin or orbital) are randomly aligned?




No comments:

Post a Comment

classical mechanics - Moment of a force about a given axis (Torque) - Scalar or vectorial?

I am studying Statics and saw that: The moment of a force about a given axis (or Torque) is defined by the equation: $M_X = (\vec r \times \...