Related papers: High resolution simulations of unstable modes in a…
The origin of spiral patterns in galaxies is still not fully understood. Similar features also develop readily in N-body simulations of isolated cool, collisionless disks, yet even here the mechanism has yet to be explained. In this series…
We study the bar instability in collisionless, rotating, anisotropic, stellar systems, using N-body simulations and also the matrix technique for calculation of modes with the perturbed collisionless Boltzmann equation. These methods are…
N-body dynamical simulations are used to analyze the conditions for the gravitational stability of a three-dimensional stellar disk in the gravitational field of two rigid spherical components--a bulge and a halo whose central…
We explore the linear stability of astrophysical discs exhibiting vertical shear, which arises when there is a radial variation in the temperature or entropy. Such discs are subject to a "vertical-shear instability", which recent nonlinear…
We are carrying out a programme of non-linear time-dependent numerical calculations to study the evolution of the thermal instability driven by radiation pressure in transonic accretion discs around black holes. In our previous studies we…
We present a new, simple, fast algorithm to numerically evolve disks of inelastically colliding particles surrounding a central star. Our algorithm adds negligible computational cost to the fastest existing collisionless N-body codes, and…
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…
In order to address the question of whether spiral disturbances in galaxy discs are gravitationally coupled to the halo, we conduct simulations of idealized models of disc galaxies. We compare growth rates of spiral instabilities in…
N-body simulations of disc galaxies that display recurrent transient spiral patterns are comparatively easy to construct, but are harder to understand. In this paper, I summarise the evidence from such experiments that the spiral patterns…
(Abridged) We analyse the stability and evolution of power-law accretion disc models. These have midplane densities that follow radial power-laws, and have either temperature or entropy distributions that are power-law functions of…
Debris discs are traditionally studied using two distinct types of numerical models: statistical particle-in-a-box codes to study their collisional and size distribution evolution, and dynamical N-body models to study their spatial…
The stability of a galaxy model is most easily assessed through N-body simulation. Particle-mesh codes have been widely used for this purpose, since they enable the largest numbers of particles to be employed. We show that the functional…
We present two-dimensional inviscid hydrodynamic simulations of overstable inertial-acoustic oscillation modes (p-modes) in black-hole accretion discs. These global spiral waves are trapped in the inner-most region of the disc, and are…
This paper continues a series reporting different aspects of the behaviour of disc galaxy simulations that support spiral instabilities. The focus in this paper is to demonstrate how linear spiral instabilities saturate and decay, and how…
The Vertical Shear Instability is one of two known mechanisms potentially active in the so-called dead zones of protoplanetary accretion disks. A recent analysis indicates that a subset of unstable modes shows unbounded growth - both as…
We present a perturbation theory for studying the instabilities of non-axisymmetric gaseous discs. We perturb the dynamical equations of self-gravitating fluids in the vicinity of a non-axisymmetric equilibrium, and expand the perturbed…
Using the linearized Boltzmann equation, we investigate how grooves carved in the phase space of a half-mass Mestel disc can trigger the vigorous growth of two-armed spiral eigenmodes. Such grooves result from the collisional dynamics of a…
I utilize the Petrov-Galerkin formulation and develop a new method for solving the unsteady collisionless Boltzmann equation in both the linear and nonlinear regimes. In the first order approximation, the method reduces to a linear…
The bar formation is still an open problem in modern astrophysics. In this paper we present numerical simulation performed with the aim of analyzing the growth of the bar instability inside stellar-gaseous disks, where the star formation is…
In the mean field limit, isolated gravitational systems often evolve towards a steady state through a violent relaxation phase. One question is to understand the nature of this relaxation phase, in particular the role of radial…