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Related papers: Star Formation in Spiral Arms

200 papers

Protoplanetary disk simulations show that a single planet can excite more than one spiral arm, possibly explaining recent observations of multiple spiral arms in some systems. In this paper, we explain the mechanism by which a planet…

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics · Physics 2018-06-13 Jaehan Bae , Zhaohuan Zhu

Stars and star clusters form by gravoturbulent fragmentation of interstellar gas clouds. The supersonic turbulence ubiquitously observed in Galactic molecular gas generates strong density fluctuations with gravity taking over in the densest…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2015-05-30 Ralf S. Klessen

Tidal encounters are believed to be one of the key drivers of galactic spiral structure in the Universe. Such spirals are expected to produce different morphological and kinematic features compared to density wave and dynamic spiral arms.…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2017-05-10 Alex R. Pettitt , Elizabeth J. Tasker , James W. Wadsley , Ben W. Keller , Samantha M. Benincasa

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…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2022-10-26 George Contopoulos

Understanding star formation is problematic as it originates in the large scale dynamics of a galaxy but occurs on the small scale of an individual star forming event. This paper presents the first numerical simulations to resolve the star…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2015-06-12 Ian A. Bonnell , Clare L. Dobbs , Rowan J. Smith

In the inner 3kpc of M51 we find that logarithmic spirals provide good fits to the peak intensities in molecular gas observed by BIMA in the CO (J=1-0) emission line along the spiral arms. However, we measure significant asymmetries between…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-11-10 Alaina L. Henry , A. C. Quillen , Robert Gutermuth

(ABBREVIATED) Understanding the formation of stars in galaxies is central to much of modern astrophysics. In this review the relation between interstellar turbulence and star formation is discussed. Supersonic turbulence can provide support…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-09-29 Ralf S. Klessen

We describe simulations of the response of a gaseous disc to an active spiral potential. The potential is derived from an N-body calculation and leads to a multi-armed time-evolving pattern. The gas forms long spiral arms typical of grand…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-11-13 Clare Dobbs , Ian Bonnell

By combining two surveys covering a large fraction of the molecular material in the Galactic disk we investigate the role the spiral arms play in the star formation process. We have matched clumps identified by ATLASGAL with their parental…

Gaia recently revealed a two-armed spiral pattern in the vertical phase-space distribution of the inner Galactic disk (guiding radius $R_\textrm{g} \sim 6.2$ kpc), indicating that some non-adiabatic perturbation symmetric about the…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2025-10-22 Rimpei Chiba , Neige Frankel , Chris Hamilton

Understanding the star formation process is central to much of modern astrophysics. For several decades it has been thought that stellar birth is primarily controlled by the interplay between gravity and magnetostatic support, modulated by…

Astrophysics · Physics 2007-05-23 Ralf S. Klessen

We study formation and long-term evolution of a circumstellar disk in a collapsing molecular cloud core using a resistive magnetohydrodynamic simulation. While the formed circumstellar disk is initially small, it grows as accretion…

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics · Physics 2017-01-25 Kengo Tomida , Masahiro N. Machida , Takashi Hosokawa , Yuya Sakurai , Chia Hui Lin

Massive stars form in clusters within self-gravitating molecular clouds. The size scale of these clusters is sufficiently large that non-thermal, or turbulent, motions of the gas must be taken into account when considering their formation.…

Astrophysics · Physics 2007-05-23 Jonathan Williams

The Galactic center of the Milky-Way harbors a massive black hole (BH) orbited by a diverse population of young and old stars. A significant fraction of the youngest stars ($\sim4-7$ Myr) reside in a thin stellar disk with puzzling…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2018-02-02 Hagai B. Perets , Alessandra Mastrobuono-Battisti , Yohai Meiron , Alessia Gualandris

We begin by recalling the isothermal, collisionless, disc-halo. The disc component is the Mestel disc. Subsequently we introduce spiral arms to such an isothermal disc-halo system that are co-moving in the mean with an axi-symmetric…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2012-07-24 R. N. Henriksen

Gas processes affecting star formation are reviewed with an emphasis on gravitational and magnetic instabilities as a source of turbulence. Gravitational instabilities are pervasive in a multi-phase medium, even for sub-threshold column…

Astrophysics · Physics 2008-11-26 Bruce G. Elmegreen

Spiral arms are some of the most spectacular features in disc galaxies, and also present in our own Milky Way. It has been argued that star formation should proceed more efficiently in spiral arms as a result of gas compression. Yet,…

By means of simple dynamical experiments we study the combined effect of gravitational and gas dynamics in the evolution of an initially out-of-equilibrium, uniform and rotating massive over-density thought of as in isolation. The rapid…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2020-10-14 Francesco Sylos Labini , Luis Diego Pinto , Roberto Capuzzo-Dolcetta

The nature of galactic spiral arms in disc galaxies remains elusive. Regardless of the spiral model, arms are expected to play a role in sculpting the star-forming interstellar medium. As such, different arm models may result in differences…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2020-08-12 Alex R. Pettitt , Clare L. Dobbs , Junichi Baba , Dario Colombo , Ana Duarte-Cabral , Fumi Egusa , Asao Habe

The dynamical nature and formation mechanism(s) of galactic spiral arms remain long-standing problems in astrophysics. Most theoretical work is based on analytic calculations or idealised simulations, which has yielded several theories of…