Related papers: Swinging Spiral Arms
We propose a new dynamical picture of galactic stellar and gas spirals, based on hydrodynamic simulations in a `live' stellar disk. We focus especially on spiral structures excited in a isolated galactic disk without a stellar bar. Using…
We use an N-body simulation to study the 3-D density distribution of spirals, and the resulting stellar vertical velocities. Relative to the disc's rotation, the phase of the spiral's peak density away from the mid-plane trails that at the…
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,…
We explore the interplay between in-plane and vertical dynamics in stellar discs within the framework of the shearing box approximation. Julian and Toomre used the shearing sheet to show that leading density waves are amplified as they…
Spiral arms are the defining features of broad morphological classes of disc galaxies, but their nature and influence on galaxy evolution is still under debate. A key diagnostic for their nature is the spiral arm pattern speed: the radial…
Spiral arm structures seen in scattered light observations of protoplanetary disks can potentially serve as signposts of planetary companions. They can also lend unique insights into disk masses, which are critical in setting the mass…
Spiral arms that emerge from the ends of a galactic bar are important in interpreting observations of our and external galaxies. It is therefore important to understand the physical mechanism that causes them. We find that these spiral arms…
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,…
Spiral arms are observed in numerous protoplanetary discs. These spiral arms can be excited by companions, either on bound or unbound orbits. We simulate a scenario where an unbound perturber, i.e. a flyby, excites spiral arms during a…
Spiral shocks are potentially a major source of turbulence in the interstellar medium. To address this problem quantitatively, we use numerical simulations to investigate gas flow across spiral arms in vertically stratified,…
An overwhelming majority of galactic spiral arms trail with respect to the rotation of the galaxy, though a small sample of leading spiral arms has been observed. The formation of these leading spirals is not well understood. Here we show,…
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…
The shearing sheet model of a galactic disk is studied anew. The theoretical description of its dynamics is based on three building blocks: Stellar orbits, which are described here in epicyclic approximation, the collisionless Boltzmann…
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…
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…
The formation and evolution of galactic spiral arms is not yet clearly understood despite many analytic and numerical work. Recently, a new idea has been proposed that local density enhancements (waklets) arising in the galactic disk…
Using 2D nonlinear simulations, we study the generation and nonlinear evolution of spiral structure in a star-forming multi-component gravitating disk. We confirm in agreement with previous studies the destabilizing role of a cold gaseous…
We discuss the properties of spiral arms in a N-body simulation of a barred galaxy and present evidence that these are manifold-driven. The strongest evidence comes from following the trajectories of individual particles. Indeed, these move…
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…
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.…