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Related papers: Coherent Stellar Motion in Galactic Spiral Arms by…

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The Galactic disk retains a vast amount of information about how it came to be, and how it evolved over cosmic time. However, we know very little about the secular processes associated with disk evolution. One major uncertainty is the…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2015-05-18 Joss Bland-Hawthorn , Mark Krumholz , Ken Freeman

(Abridged) We analyze the evolution of 42 spiral galaxies in the Spitzer Infrared Nearby Galaxies Survey, using extinction-corrected UV, optical and near-infrared radial profiles to probe the emission of stars of different ages as a…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2015-05-27 J. C. Muñoz-Mateos , S. Boissier , A. Gil de Paz , J. Zamorano , R. C. Kennicutt , J. Moustakas , N. Prantzos , J. Gallego

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…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-11-13 Clare Dobbs , Ian Bonnell

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…

Using integral field spectroscopy from SDSS-IV MaNGA, we investigate the radial distributions of star formation rate (SFR) and gas-phase metallicity in spiral galaxies that reside in spiral-elliptical (S+E) pairs. Spirals in S+E pairs show…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2026-04-16 Cailu Shi , Shuai Feng , Shiyin Shen , Linlin Li , Wenyuan Cui , Guozhen Hu

Spiral arms are observed in numerous protoplanetary discs. These spiral arms can be excited by companions, either on bound or unbound orbits. We simulate a scenario where an unbound perturber, i.e. a flyby, excites spiral arms during a…

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics · Physics 2023-03-29 Jeremy L. Smallwood , Chao-Chin Yang , Zhaohuan Zhu , Rebecca G. Martin , Ruobing Dong , Nicolás Cuello , Andrea Isella

Context. The physical processes driving the formation of Galactic spiral arms are still under debate. Studies using open clusters favour the description of the Milky Way spiral arms as long-lived structures following the classical density…

We report the highest-fidelity observations of the spiral galaxy M51 in CO emission, revealing the evolution of giant molecular clouds (GMCs) vis-a-vis the large-scale galactic structure and dynamics. The most massive GMCs (so-called GMAs)…

We investigate the properties and evolution of star particles in two simulations of isolated spiral galaxies, and two galaxies from cosmological simulations. Unlike previous numerical work, where typically each star particle represents one…

Spiral arms are some of the most spectacular features in disc galaxies, and also present in our own Milky Way. It has been argued that star formation should proceed more efficiently in spiral arms as a result of gas compression. Yet,…

Starting from an axisymmetric equilibrium distribution function (DF) in action space, representing a Milky Way thin disc stellar population, we use the linearized Boltzmann equation to explicitly compute the response to a three-dimensional…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2016-06-23 Giacomo Monari , Benoit Famaey , Arnaud Siebert

One of the striking discoveries of protoplanetary disc research in recent years are the spiral arms seen in several transitional discs in polarised scattered light. An interesting interpretation of the observed spiral features is that they…

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics · Physics 2015-05-27 Attila Juhasz , Myriam Benisty , Adriana Pohl , Cornelis Dullemond , Carsten Dominik , Sijme-Jan Paardekooper

Gaia data have revealed vertically asymmetric phase-space structures in the Milky Way (MW) disc, such as phase spirals, indicating vertical oscillations. These oscillations exhibit two distinct modes: the bending mode and the breathing…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2025-08-14 Tetsuro Asano , Michiko S. Fujii , Junichi Baba , Simon Portegies Zwart , Jeroen Bédorf

By combining two surveys covering a large fraction of the molecular material in the Galactic disk we investigate the role the spiral arms play in the star formation process. We have matched clumps identified by ATLASGAL with their parental…

The conservation of stellar actions is a fundamental assumption in orbit reconstruction studies in the Milky Way. However, the disc is highly dynamic, with time-dependent, non-axisymmetric features like transient spiral arms and giant…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2025-09-24 Arunima Arunima , Mark Krumholz , Michael Ireland , Chuhan Zhang , Zipeng Hu

Context. Stellar migration of the galactic disc stars has been invoked to explain the dispersion of stellar metallicity observed in the solar neighborhood. Aims. We seek to identify the dynamical mechanisms underlying stellar migration in…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2020-10-28 Herve Wozniak

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,…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2020-09-02 Aleksandr Mosenkov , Sergey Savchenko , Alexander Marchuk

An N-body hybrid simulation, integrating both massive and tracer particles, of a Galactic disk is used to study the stellar phase space distribution or velocity distributions in different local neighborhoods. Pattern speeds identified in…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2015-05-20 Alice C. Quillen , Jamie Dougherty , Micaela B. Bagley , Ivan Minchev , Justin Comparetta

Efforts to dynamically trace stars back to the now-dissolved clusters in which they formed rely implicitly on the assumption that stellar orbital actions are conserved. While this holds in a static, axisymmetric potential, it is unknown how…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2026-04-28 Arunima Arunima , Mark R. Krumholz , Michael J. Ireland , Chuhan Zhang , Sven Buder

We present a 2-dimensional chemical evolution code applied to a Milky Way type galaxy, incorporating the role of spiral arms in shaping azimuthal abundance variations, and confront the predicted behaviour with recent observations taken with…