Related papers: Transient spirals as superposed instabilities
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…
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…
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…
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…
We seek to understand the origin of radial migration in spiral galaxies by analyzing in detail the structure and evolution of an idealized, isolated galactic disk. To understand the redistribution of stars, we characterize the…
Transient spiral waves of moderate amplitude cause substantial changes to the angular momenta of many stars in a galaxy disk. Stars near to corotation are affected most strongly: for a wave of ~20% overdensity, the rms change for particles…
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,…
We show that spiral waves in galaxy discs churn the stars and gas in a manner that largely preserves the overall angular momentum distribution and leads to little increase in random motion. Changes in the angular momenta of individual stars…
Spiral patterns are important agents of galaxy evolution. In this review, I describe how the redistribution of angular momentum by recurrent transient spiral patterns causes the random speeds of stars to rise over time, metallicity…
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 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.…
We consider a differentially rotating, 2D stellar disk perturbed by two steady state spiral density waves moving at different patterns speeds. Our investigation is based on direct numerical integration of initially circular test-particle…
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 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…
Stars in disks of spiral galaxies are usually assumed to remain roughly at their birth radii. This assumption is built into decades of modelling of the evolution of stellar populations in our own Galaxy and in external systems. We present…
We show that in N-body simulations of isolated spiral discs, spiral arms appear to transient, recurring features that co-rotate with the stellar disc stars at all radii. As a consequence, stars around the spiral arm continually feel a…
We consider a differentially rotating, 2D stellar disk perturbed by two steady state spiral density waves moving at different patterns speeds. Our investigation is based on direct numerical integration of initially circular test-particle…
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…
We have recently identified a new radial migration mechanism resulting from the overlap of spiral and bar resonances in galactic disks. Here we confirm the efficiency of this mechanism in fully self-consistent, Tree-SPH simulations, as well…
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…