Related papers: Dawes Review 4: Spiral Structures in Disc Galaxies
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…
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…
We investigate the formation of substructure in spiral galaxies using global MHD simulations, including gas self-gravity. Our models extend previous local models by Kim and Ostriker (2002) by including the full effects of curvilinear…
We perform local $N$-body simulations of disk galaxies and investigate the evolution of spiral arms. We calculate the time autocorrelation of the surface density of spiral arms and find that the typical evolution timescale is described by…
The spiral arms spanning disk galaxies are believed to be created by density waves that propagate through galactic disks. We present a novel method of finding the co-rotation radius where the spiral arm pattern speed matches the velocities…
A method which we have developed for determining corotation radii, has allowed us to map in detail the radial resonant structures of barred spiral galaxies. Here we have combined this information with new determinations of the bar strength…
We present results of three-dimensional nonlinear MHD simulations of a large-scale magnetic field and its evolution inside a barred galaxy with the back reaction of the magnetic field on the gas. The model does not consider the dynamo…
The way in which radial flows shape galaxy structure and evolution remains an open question. Internal drivers of such flows, such as bars and spiral arms, known to mediate gas flows in the local Universe, are now observable at high redshift…
Galactic magnetic arms have been observed between the gaseous arms of some spiral galaxies; their origin remains unclear. We suggest that magnetic spiral arms can be naturally generated in the interarm regions because the galactic fountain…
We present the results from simulations of GMC formation in spiral galaxies. First we discuss cloud formation by cloud-cloud collisions, and gravitational instabilities, arguing that the former is prevalent at lower galactic surface…
In this series of papers, we propose a theory to explain the formation and properties of rings and spirals in barred galaxies. The building blocks of these structures are orbits guided by the manifolds emanating from the unstable Lagrangian…
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,…
The process that leads to the formation of the bright star forming sites observed along prominent spiral arms remains elusive. We present results of a multi-wavelength study of a spiral arm segment in the nearby grand-design spiral galaxy…
Context. Observations of polarized radio emission show that large-scale (regular) magnetic fields in spiral galaxies are not axisymmetric, but generally stronger in interarm regions. In some nearby galaxies such as NGC 6946 they are…
We run N-body smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) simulations of a Milky Way sized galaxy. The code takes into account hydrodynamics, self-gravity, star formation, supernova and stellar wind feedback, radiative cooling and metal…
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,…
In this paper, we look to analyse the spiral features of grand-design, multiarmed, and flocculent spiral galaxies using deep optical imaging from DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys. We explore the resulting distributions of various characteristics…
Spiral arms have been observed in nearly a dozen protoplanetary discs in near-infrared scattered light and recently also in the sub-millimetre continuum. While one of the most compelling explanations is that they are driven by planetary or…
In the density wave theory of spiral structure, the grand-design two-armed spiral pattern is taken to rotate rigidly in a galactic disc with a constant, definite pattern speed. The observational measurement of the pattern speed of the…
This paper presents a detailed analysis of two-armed spiral structure in a sample of galax- ies from the Spitzer Infrared Nearby Galaxies Survey (SINGS), with particular focus on the relationships between the properties of the spiral…