Related papers: Interplay between Stellar Spirals and the ISM in G…
Gas in disk galaxies interacts nonlinearly with an underlying stellar spiral potential to form galactic spiral shocks. While numerical simulations typically show that spiral shocks are unstable to wiggle instability (WI) even in the absence…
We explore various instability models for the onset of star formation in irregular galaxies. Critical gas densities are calculated for gravitational instabilities with a thin, pure-gas disk, and with a thick disk composed of gas and a…
Star formation depends on the available gaseous "fuel" as well as galactic environment, with higher specific star formation rates where gas is predominantly molecular and where stellar (and dark matter) densities are higher. The partition…
Gravitational instabilities can drive small-scale turbulence and large-scale spiral arms in massive gaseous disks under conditions of slow radiative cooling. These motions affect the observed disk morphology, its mass accretion rate and…
Gaseous substructures such as feathers and spurs dot the landscape of spiral arms in disc galaxies. One of the candidates to explain their formation is the wiggle instability of galactic spiral shocks. We study the wiggle instability using…
The density-wave theory of spiral structure proposes that star formation occurs in or near a spiral-shaped region of higher density that rotates rigidly within the galactic disk at a fixed pattern speed. In most interpretations of this…
Ionized gas and stellar kinematics have been measured along the major axes of seventeen nearby spiral galaxies of intermediate to late morphological type. We discuss the properties of each sample galaxy distinguishing between those…
We investigate the triggering of star formation in clouds that form in Galactic scale flows as the ISM passes through spiral shocks. We use the Lagrangian nature of SPH simulations to trace how the star forming gas is gathered into…
I review observational studies of the large-scale star formation process in nearby galaxies. A wealth of new multi-wavelength data provide an unprecedented view on the interplay of the interstellar medium and (young) stellar populations on…
We model gravitational collapse leading to star formation in a wide range of isolated disk galaxies using a three-dimensional, smoothed particle hydrodynamics code. The model galaxies include a dark matter halo and a disk of stars and…
High redshift disc galaxies are more gas rich, clumpier, and more turbulent than local Universe galaxies. This early era of galaxy formation imprints the distribution and kinematics of the stars that we observe today, but it is not yet well…
Spiral arms are the most characteristic features of disc galaxies, easily distinguishable due to their association with ongoing star formation. However, the role of spiral structure in the chemical evolution of galaxies is unclear. Here we…
Theories of stellar spiral arms in disk galaxies can be grouped into two classes based on the longevity of a spiral arm. Although the quasi-stationary density wave theory supposes that spirals are rigidly-rotating, long-lived patterns, the…
We study the response of the gaseous component of a galactic disc to the time dependent potential generated by N-body simulations of a spiral galaxy. The results show significant variation of the spiral structure of the gas which might be…
A dynamical model for star formation on a galactic scale is proposed in which the interstellar medium is constantly condensing to star-forming clouds on the dynamical time of the average midplane density, and the clouds are constantly being…
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…
The extra stiffness that the magnetic field adds to the ISM changes the way it reacts to the presence of a spiral perturbation. At intermediate to high z, the gas shoots up before the arm, flows over, and falls behind it, as it approaches…
Context. Regularly-spaced, star-forming regions along the spiral arms of nearby galaxies provide insight into the early stages and initial conditions of star formation. The regular separation of these star-forming regions suggests spiral…
Spiral-driven instabilities may drive gas inflow to enhance central star formation in disk galaxies. We investigate this hypothesis using the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) in a sample of 2779 nearby unbarred star-forming main-sequence…
Interstellar turbulence is driven over a wide range of scales by processes including spiral arm instabilities and supernovae, and it affects the rate and morphology of star formation, energy dissipation, and angular momentum transfer in…