Related papers: Spiral Instabilities in N-body Simulations I: Emer…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
We present N-body simulations of unstable spiral modes in a dynamically cool collisionless disc. We show that spiral modes grow in a thin collisionless disk in accordance with the analytical perturbation theory. We use the particle-mesh…
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…
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.…
The stability of a rotating fluid disk to the formation of spiral arms is studied in the tightwinding approximation in the linear regime. The dispersion relation for spirals that was derived by Bertin et al. is shown to contain a new,…
Class II protoplanetary discs feature numerous non-axisymmetric substructures like spirals and the underlying mechanisms for their formation are still highly debated. Coincidentally, early stage, massive discs are subject to the…
We investigate the formation of multiple spiral modes in Milky Way-like disk-halo systems without explicitly exciting perturbations. We explore how numerical resolution, the level of local disk stability, and the presence of a live halo…
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,…
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…
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…
Deep HI observations of the outer parts of disc galaxies demonstrate the frequent presence of extended, well-developed spiral arms far beyond the optical radius. To understand the nature and the origin of such outer spiral structure, we…
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…
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…
We demonstrate that the chaotic nature of N-body systems can lead to macroscopic variations in the evolution of collisionless simulations containing rotationally supported discs. The unavoidable stochasticity that afflicts all simulations…
Simulations of purely self-gravitating N-body systems are often used in astrophysics and cosmology to study the collisionless limit of such systems. Their results for macroscopic quantities should then converge well for sufficiently large…