Related papers: Spiral instabilities in N-body simulations
A long-standing controversy in studies of spiral structure has concerned the lifetimes of individual spiral patterns. Much theoretical work has sought quasi-stationary spiral modes while N-body simulations have consistently displayed…
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 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…
We present evidence that recurrent spiral activity, long manifested in simulations of disk galaxies, results from the super-position of a few transient spiral modes. Each mode lasts between 5 and 10 rotations at its corotation radius where…
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…
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…
The causes of spiral structure in galaxies remain uncertain. Leaving aside the grand bisymmetric spirals with their own well-known complications, here we consider the possibility that multi-armed spiral features originate from density…
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…
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…
We present a study of the spiral responses in a stable disc galaxy model to co-orbiting perturbing masses that are evenly spaced around rings. The amplitudes of the responses, or wakes, are proportional to the masses of the perturbations,…
Spiral density wave theory attempts to describe the spiral pattern in spiral galaxies in terms of a long-lived wave structure with a constant pattern speed in order to avoid the winding dilemma. The pattern is consequently a rigidly…
Fragmentation of a spiral arm is thought to drive the formation of giant clumps in galaxies. Using linear perturbation analysis for self-gravitating spiral arms, we derive an instability parameter and define the conditions for clump…
We study transient spiral structures in an isothermal, thin, galactic disc. We find no instability that can grow everywhere from infinitesimal disturbances, but spiral structure does grow in the disc due to an arbitrarily strong,…
We present results from a suite of three-dimensional global hydrodynamic simulations which show that spiral density waves propagating in circumstellar disks are unstable to the growth of a parametric instability that leads to break-down of…
Spiral density waves can arise in galactic disks as linear instabilities of the underlying stellar distribution function. Such an instability grows exponentially in amplitude at some fixed growth rate $\beta$ before saturating nonlinearly.…
Spiral patterns in some disc galaxies have two arms in the centre, and three or more arms on the periphery. The same result is also obtained in numerical simulations of stellar and gaseous discs. We argue that such patterns may occur due to…
The rate of internally-driven evolution of galaxy discs is strongly affected by the lifetimes of the spiral patterns they support. Evolution is much faster if the spiral patterns are recurrent short-lived transients rather than long-lived,…
Spiral structure in disk galaxies is modeled with nine collisionless N-body simulations including live disks, halos, and bulges with a range of masses. Two of these simulations make long-lasting and strong two-arm spiral wave modes that…
Spiral density wave theory attempts to describe the spiral pattern in spiral galaxies in terms of a long-lived wave structure with a constant pattern speed in order to avoid the winding dilemma. The pattern is consequently a rigidly…
In order to understand the physical mechanism underlying non-steady stellar spiral arms in disk galaxies we performed a series of N-body simulations with 1.2 and 8 million particles. The initial conditions were chosen to follow…