Related papers: Lindblad's epicycles - valid method or bad science…
After a short review of the principal theories of spiral structure in galaxies, I describe two new developments. First, it now seems clear that linear theory cannot yield a full description for the development of spiral patterns because…
Already slightly eccentric orbits, such as those occupied by many old stars in the Galactic disk, are not well approximated by Lindblad's epicycle theory. Here, alternative approximations for flat orbits in axisymmetric stellar systems are…
The apsidal precession frequency in a fixed gravitational potential increases with the radial range of the orbit (eccentricity). Although the frequency increase is modest it can have important implications for wave dynamics in galaxy discs,…
Spirals in galaxies have long been thought to be caused by gravitational instability in the stellar component of the disk, but discerning the precise mechanism had proved elusive. Tidal interactions, and perhaps bars, may provoke some…
Context: Resonances in the stellar orbital motion under perturbations from spiral arms structure play an important role in the evolution of the disks of spiral galaxies. The epicyclic approximation allows the determination of the…
In a series of papers, we propose a theory to explain the formation and properties of rings and spirals in barred galaxies. The building blocks of these structures are orbits guided by the manifolds emanating from the unstable Lagrangian…
The presence of spiral structure in isolated galaxies is a problem that has only been partially explained by theoretical models. Because the rate and pattern of star formation in the disk must depend only on mechanisms internal to the disk,…
We present a unified theory of linear spiral structure in stellar disks. We begin by identifying the characteristic scales involved in the spiral structure problem and listing some quantitative requirements of a successful theory. We then…
We argue that self-excited instabilities are the cause of spiral patterns in simulations of unperturbed stellar discs. In previous papers, we have found that spiral patterns were caused by a few concurrent waves, which we claimed were…
The most important theory of the spiral arms of galaxies is the density wave theory based on the Lin-Shu dispersion relation. However, the density waves move with the group velocity towards the inner Lindblad resonance and tend to…
In this and in a previous paper (Romero-Gomez et al. 2006) we propose a theory to explain the formation of both spirals and rings in barred galaxies using a common dynamical framework. It is based on the orbital motion driven by the…
Galactic spiral shocks are dominant morphological features and believed to be responsible for substructure formation within spiral arms in disk galaxies. They can also contribute a substantial amount of kinetic energy to the interstellar…
Alignments of spiral galaxies were thought to result from tidal torquing, where tidal field of the cosmic large-scale structure exert torquing moments onto dark matter haloes, determining their angular momentum and ultimately the…
The majority of astrophysics involves the study of spiral galaxies, and stars and planets within them, but how spiral arms in galaxies form and evolve is still a fundamental problem. Major progress in this field was made primarily in the…
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…
In this review, I discuss just three aspects of the stability and evolution of galactic discs. (1) I first review our understanding of the bar instability and how it can be controlled. Disc galaxies in which the orbital speed does not…
The ellipsoid of stellar random motions is a fundamental ingredient of galaxy dynamics. Yet it has long been difficult to constrain this component in disks others than the Milky Way. This article presents the modeling of the…
Modern cosmology rests on the cosmological principle, that on large enough scales the Universe is both homogeneous and isotropic. A corollary is that galaxies' spin vectors should be isotropically distributed on the sky. This has been…
Using an equation of motion for a self-gravitating filament, we show how galactic spiral arms might be created and sustained. We find that the combination of differential rotation of the galactic disk and the self-gravity of the arm (as…
In recent years, several protoplanetary discs have been observed to exhibit spirals, both in scattered light and (sub)millimetre continuum data. The HD 100453 binary star system hosts such a disc around its primary. Previous work has argued…