Related papers: Feathering Instability of Spiral Arms. II. Paramet…
In this paper we study the feathering substructures along spiral arms by considering the perturbational gas response to a spiral shock. Feathers are density fluctuations that jut out from the spiral arm to the inter-arm region at pitch…
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…
It has been suggested that the wiggle instability (WI) of spiral shocks in a galactic disk is responsible for the formation of gaseous feathers observed in grand-design spiral galaxies. We perform both a linear stability analysis and…
We present Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) simulations of the response of gas discs to a spiral potential. These simulations show that the commonly observed spurs and feathering in spiral galaxies can be understood as being due to…
We investigate dynamical states of grand-design spiral arms in three local galaxies: M51, NGC3627 and NGC628. Based on linear perturbation analysis considering multiple components in the galaxies, we compute instability parameters of the…
(Abridged) We investigate the growth of spiral-arm substructure in vertically stratified, self-gravitating, galactic gas disks, using local numerical MHD simulations. Our new models extend our previous 2D studies (Kim & Ostriker 2002),…
Galactic spiral shocks are dominant morphological features and believed to be responsible for substructure formation within spiral arms in disk galaxies. They can also contribute a substantial amount of kinetic energy to the interstellar…
Theoretical studies on the response of interstellar gas to a gravitational potential disc with a quasi-stationary spiral arm pattern suggest that the gas experiences a sudden compression due to standing shock waves at spiral arms. This…
Making use of a set of detailed potential models for normal spiral galaxies, we analyze the disk stellar orbital dynamics as the structural and dynamical parameters of the spiral arms (mass, pattern speed and pitch angle) are gradually…
Intermediate-scale spurs are common in spiral galaxies, but perhaps most distinctively evident in a recent HST image of M51 (Scoville & Rector 2001). We investigate, using time-dependent numerical MHD simulations, how such spurs could form…
Fragmentation of spiral arms can drive the formation of giant clumps and induce intense star formation in disc galaxies. Based on the spiral-arm instability analysis of our Paper I, we present linear perturbation theory of dynamical…
We use hydrodynamic simulations to investigate nonlinear gas responses to an imposed stellar spiral potential in disk galaxies. The gaseous medium is assumed to be infinitesimally thin, isothermal, and unmagnetized. We consider various…
In the inner 3kpc of M51 we find that logarithmic spirals provide good fits to the peak intensities in molecular gas observed by BIMA in the CO (J=1-0) emission line along the spiral arms. However, we measure significant asymmetries between…
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…
The generation of spiral arms and the mechanisms controlling their properties within a realistic cosmological framework - the complete understanding is still beyond our grasp. Using a statistically significant sample of Milky Way- and…
We found that loosely wound spiral shocks in an isothermal gas disk caused by a non-axisymmetric potential are hydrodynamically unstable, if the shocks are strong enough. High resolution, global hydrodynamical simulations using three…
We present a survey of spiral arm extinction substructure referred to as feathers in 223 spiral galaxies using HST WFPC2 images. The sample includes all galaxies in the RC3 catalog with cz < 5000 km/s, B_T < 15, i < 60 degrees, and types…
Fragmentation of a spiral arm is thought to drive the formation of giant clumps in galaxies. Using linear perturbation analysis for self-gravitating spiral arms, we derive an instability parameter and define the conditions for clump…
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…
We study numerically large-scale magnetic field evolution and its enhancement in gaseous disks of spiral galaxies. We consider a set of models with the various spiral pattern parameters and the initial magnetic field strength with taking…