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Paper   IPM / Astronomy / 16626
School of Astronomy
  Title:   The SAMI Galaxy Survey: Kinematics of stars and gas in brightest group galaxies; the role of group dynamics
  Author(s): 
1.  M. Raouf
2.  R. Smith
3.  H. G. Khosroshahi
4.  J. van de Sande
5.  J. J. Bryant
6.  L. Cortese
7.  S. Brough
8.  S. M. Croom
9.  Ho . Seong Hwang
10.  S. Driver
11.  A. R. LÃ?³pez-SÃ?¡nchez
12.  J. Ko
13.  J-W. Kim
14.  J. Shin
15.  N. Scott
16.  J. Bland-Hawthorn
17.  S. N. Richards
18.  M. Owers
19.  J.S. . Lawrence
20.  I. S. Konstantopoulos
  Status:   Published
  Journal: Astrophysical Journal
  No.:  2
  Vol.:  908
  Year:  2021
  Supported by:            ipm IPM
  Abstract:
We study the stellar and gas kinematics of the brightest group galaxies (BGGs) in dynamically relaxed and unrelaxed galaxy groups for a sample of 154 galaxies in the SAMI galaxy survey. We characterize the dynamical state of the groups using the luminosity gap between the two most luminous galaxies and the BGG offset from the luminosity centroid of the group. We find that the misalignment between the rotation axis of gas and stellar components is more frequent in the BGGs in unrelaxed groups, although with quite low statistical significance. Meanwhile galaxies whose stellar dynamics would be classified as `regular rotators' based on their kinemetry are more common in relaxed groups. We confirm that this dependency on group dynamical state remains valid at fixed stellar mass and Sersic index. The observed trend could potentially originate from a differing BGG accretion history in virialised and evolving groups. Amongst the halo relaxation probes, the group BGG offset appears to play a stronger role than the luminosity gap on the stellar kinematic differences of the BGGs. However, both the group BGG offset and luminosity gap appear to roughly equally drive the misalignment between the gas and stellar component of the BGGs in one direction. This study offers the first evidence that the dynamical state of galaxy groups may influence the BGG's stellar and gas kinematics and calls for further studies using a larger sample with higher signal-to-noise

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