The Environmental Effects in the Origin of Angular Momenta of Galaxies

We study the galaxy alignment in the sample of very rich Abell clusters located in and outside superclusters. The statistically significant difference among investigated samples exists. We found that in contrast to the full sample of clusters, where alignment increase with the cluster richness, the clusters belonging to superclusters do not show this effect. Moreover, the alignment decreases with the supercluster richness. One should note however that orientations of galaxies in analyzed clusters are not random, both in the case when we analyzed the full sample of clusters and only clusters belonging to superclusters. The observed trend, dependence of galaxy alignment on both cluster location and supercluster richness clearly supports the idea of influence of environmental effects to the origin of galaxy angular momenta. (authors)