Related papers: Galactic Spiral Arms by Swing Amplification
Theories of spiral structure traditionally separate into tight-winding Lin-Shu spiral density waves and the swing-amplified material patterns of Goldreich & Lynden-Bell and Julian & Toomre. In this paper we consolidate these two types of…
It has been believed that spirals in pure stellar disks, especially the ones spontaneously formed, decay in several galactic rotations due to the increase of stellar velocity dispersions. Therefore, some cooling mechanism, for example…
A typical galactic disk is observed to have a finite thickness. Here, we present the study of the physical effect of introduction of finite thickness on the generation of small-scale spiral arms by swing amplification in a differentially…
In this work we determine the parameters of spiral structure for a sample of face-on spiral galaxies. In practice, the solution of this problem is a hard task because of the diversity of the observed characteristics of spiral structure,…
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…
We analyze two-armed global spiral density wave modes generated by gravitational instability in razor-thin, non-viscous, self-gravitating protoplanetary disks to understand the dependence of spiral arm morphology (pitch angle $\alpha$ and…
Rings and spiral arms are distinctive features of many galaxies, and their properties are closely related to the disk dynamics. They are often associated to stellar bars, but the details of this connection are far from clear. We study 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…
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…
Spiral galaxies are common in the local Universe, but their formation, evolution, and interplay with bars remain poorly understood. We use a sample of 391 nearby galaxies from the S$^4$G survey to characterise the winding angle and…
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…
Spiral structure is ubiquitous in the Universe, and the pitch angle of arms in spiral galaxies provide an important observable in efforts to discriminate between different mechanisms of spiral arm formation and evolution. In this paper, we…
Motivated by observations of disk galaxies with counter-rotating stars, we have run two-dimensional, collisionless N-body simulations of disk galaxies with significant counter-rotating components. For all our simulations the initial value…
The majority of astrophysics involves the study of spiral galaxies, and stars and planets within them, but how spiral arms in galaxies form and evolve is still a fundamental problem. Major progress in this field was made primarily in the…
Using an equation of motion for a self-gravitating filament, we show how galactic spiral arms might be created and sustained. We find that the combination of differential rotation of the galactic disk and the self-gravity of the arm (as…
Spiral-driven instabilities may drive gas inflow to enhance central star formation in disk galaxies. We investigate this hypothesis using the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) in a sample of 2779 nearby unbarred star-forming main-sequence…
We investigate the short-term dynamical evolution of stellar grand-design spiral arms in barred spiral galaxies using a three-dimensional (3D) $N$-body/hydrodynamic simulation. Similar to previous numerical simulations of unbarred,…
The density-wave theory of spiral structure proposes that star formation occurs in or near a spiral-shaped region of higher density that rotates rigidly within the galactic disk at a fixed pattern speed. In most interpretations of this…
Recently, it has been shown that a correlation exists between the rate of shear and the spiral arm pitch angle in disk galaxies. The rate of shear depends upon the shape of the rotation curve, which is dependent upon the mass distribution…
One of the scenarios for the formation of grand-design spiral arms in disky galaxies involves their interactions with a satellite or another galaxy. Here we consider another possibility, where the perturbation is instead due to the…