Related papers: Feathering Instability of Spiral Arms. II. Paramet…
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…
Star formation is enhanced in spiral arms because of a combination of orbit crowding, cloud collisions, and gravitational instabilities. The characteristic mass for the instability is 10^7 Msun in gas and 10^5 Msun in stars, and the…
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…
Striking regularities are found in the northwestern arm of the M31 galaxy. Star complexes located in this arm are all spaced 1.2 kpc apart and have similar sizes of about 0.6 kpc. Within the same arm region Beck et al. (1989) detected a…
We measure the stellar mass-star formation rate relation in star-forming disk galaxies at z<0.085, using Galaxy~Zoo morphologies to examine different populations of spirals as classified by their kiloparsec-scale structure. We examine the…
We study the dynamical stability of stationary galactic spiral shocks. The steady-state equilibrium flow contains a shock of the type derived by Roberts in the tightly wound approximation. We find that boundary conditions are critical in…
Using one-dimensional hydrodynamic simulations including interstellar heating, cooling, and thermal conduction, we investigate nonlinear evolution of gas flow across galactic spiral arms. We model the gas as a non-self-gravitating,…
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 examine $8\mu$m IRAC images of the grand design two-arm spiral galaxies M81 and M51 using a new method whereby pitch angles are locally determined as a function of scale and position, in contrast to traditional Fourier transform spectral…
Spiral structure (both flocculent and Grand Design types) is very rarely observed in dwarf galaxies because the formation of spiral arms requires special conditions. In this work we analyze the sample of about 40 dS-galaxies found by…
The structure of spiral galaxies is essential to understanding the dynamics and evolution of disk galaxies; however, the precise nature of spiral arms remains uncertain. Two challenges in understanding the mechanisms driving spirals are how…
More than a dozen young stars host spiral arms in their surrounding protoplanetary disks. The excitation mechanisms of such arms are under debate. The two leading hypotheses -- companion-disk interaction and gravitational instability (GI)…
We study how well the complex gas velocity fields induced by massive spiral arms are modelled by the hydrodynamical simulations we used to constrain the dark matter fraction in nearby spiral galaxies (Kranz et al. 2001, 2003). More…
We expand our pervious numerical study of the properties of the stellar velocity distribution within the disk of a two-armed spiral galaxy by considering spiral stellar density waves with different global Fourier amplitudes, C_2. We confirm…
The relation is studied between occurrence of a regular chain of star complexes and superclouds in a spiral arm, and other properties of the latter. A regular string of star complexes is located in the north-western arm of M31; they have…
Spiral arms are distinctive features of many circumstellar disks, observed in scattered light, which traces the disk surface, millimeter dust emission, which probes the disk midplane, as well as molecular emission. The two leading…
We investigate the impact of spiral structure on global star formation using a sample of 2226 nearby bright disk galaxies. Examining the relationship between spiral arms, star formation rate (SFR), and stellar mass, we find that arm…
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…
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.…
Different spiral generation mechanisms are expected to produce different morphological and kinematic features. In this first paper in a series we carefully study the parameters of spiral structure in 155 face-on spiral galaxies, selected…