English

Spiral Instabilities in N-body Simulations: Emergence from noise II

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2020-01-15 v1

Abstract

An earlier paper presented the potentially significant discovery that disturbances in simplified simulations of a stellar disc model that was predicted to be stable in linear theory grew to large amplitude over a long period of time. The ultimate appearance of true instabilities was attributed to non-linear scattering by a succession of collective waves excited by shot noise from the finite number of particles. The paper concluded that no finite number of particles, however large, could mimic a smooth disc. As this surprising finding has been challenged as an artifact of the numerical scheme employed, we here present a new calculation of the same model using a different grid geometry that confirms the original behaviour.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2001.00855,
  title  = {Spiral Instabilities in N-body Simulations: Emergence from noise II},
  author = {J. A. Sellwood},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2001.00855},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

Accepted to appear in MNRAS. 4 pages, 2 figures