SDSS. IV. MaNGA: The Impact of the Acquisition of Gas with Opposite Angular Momentum on the Evolution of Galaxies

Abstract

A gaseous counterrotating galaxy is a galaxy containing a gas component with opposite angular momentum to the main stellar disk. The counterrotating gas provides direct evidence for the accretion of external material, a key aspect in hierarchical galaxy evolution. We identified 303 gaseous counterrotators out of 9992 galaxies in MaNGA. The majority of the counterrotators are early types. This implies their formation is highly correlated with early-type galaxies, although it is still difficult to know if one leads to the other. To disentangle which of the galaxy characteristics within a morphological class were changed by the accretion of counterrotating gas, we carefully selected a comparison sample with similar fundamental galactic properties but corotation in gas. This comparison shows that gaseous counterrotation correlates with weak rotation in the stellar component, the high central concentration of star-forming regions, if present, and a higher fraction of central low ionization emission regions (cLIER) galaxies. The light distributions of the stellar components, dust and H i content (both low), and overall suppressed star formation rates are similar for both samples and seem typical for the morphological class. We claim that elliptical and about half of the lenticular counterrotators, those with weak rotation in the stellar component in the outskirts and central regions, likely have a major merger origin for the gas acquisition, and the other half of lenticulars, with stronger stellar rotation, may have a minor merger or pure gas accretion origin.