English
Related papers

Related papers: Spirals in galaxies

200 papers

In the simplest scenario, disk galaxies form predominantly in halos with high angular momentum and quiet recent assembly history, whereas spheroids are the slowly-rotating remnants of repeated merging events. We explore these assumptions…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2012-08-13 Laura V. Sales , Julio F. Navarro , Tom Theuns , Joop Schaye , Simon D. M. White , Carlos S. Frenk , Robert A. Crain , Claudio Dalla Vecchia

Recent knowledge of Galactic dynamics suggests that stars radially move on the disk when they encounter transient spiral arms that are naturally generated during the process of disk formation. We argue that a large movement of the solar…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2020-12-09 Takuji Tsujimoto , Junichi Baba

Galactic disks lie at the heart of many of the most pressing astrophysical puzzles. There are sophisticated kinetic theories that describe some aspects of galaxy disk dynamics, but extracting quantitative predictions from those theories has…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2025-12-09 Chris Hamilton , Shaunak Modak , Scott Tremaine

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…

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…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2015-05-19 M. S. Fujii , J. Baba , T. R. Saitoh , J. Makino , E. Kokubo , K. Wada

The phase spiral is a perturbation to the vertical phase-space distribution of stars in the Milky Way disk. We study the phase spiral's properties and how they vary with spatial position, in order to constrain its origin and evolution, as…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2025-07-29 Axel Widmark , Kiyan Tavangar , Josh Kalish , Kathryn V. Johnston , Jason A. S. Hunt

The distribution of gravitational torques and bar strengths in the local Universe is derived from a detailed study of 163 galaxies observed in the near-infrared. The results are compared with numerical models for spiral galaxy evolution. It…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-11-07 David L. Block , Frederic Bournaud , Francoise Combes , Ivanio Puerari , Ron Buta

The circular velocities of the inner region of disk galaxies are predicted by standard physics but velocities beyond the stellar disks are not consistent with Newtonian physics if the material there is in stable circular orbits. However,…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2023-09-19 Earl Schulz

We have recently identified a new radial migration mechanism resulting from the overlap of spiral and bar resonances in galactic disks. Here we confirm the efficiency of this mechanism in fully self-consistent, Tree-SPH simulations, as well…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2015-05-19 I. Minchev , B. Famaey , F. Combes , P. Di Matteo , M. Mouhcine , H. Wozniak

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…

Astrophysics · Physics 2015-05-13 Bruce G. Elmegreen

Gas in disk galaxies interacts nonlinearly with an underlying stellar spiral potential to form galactic spiral shocks. While numerical simulations typically show that spiral shocks are unstable to wiggle instability (WI) even in the absence…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2015-06-19 Woong-Tae Kim , Yonghwi Kim , Jeong-Gyu Kim

Observations show that radial metallicity gradients in disk galaxies are relatively shallow, if not flat, especially at large galactocentric distances and for galaxies in the high-redshift universe. Given that star formation and metal…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2015-06-11 Chao-Chin Yang , Mark Krumholz

A model of a galactic disk is presented which extends the homogeneous one zone models by incorporating propagation of material and energy in the disk. For reasonable values of the parameters the homogeneous steady state is unstable to the…

Astrophysics · Physics 2007-05-23 Lee Smolin

Elongated bar-like features are ubiquitous in galaxies, occurring at the centers of approximately two-thirds of spiral disks in the nearby Universe. Due to gravitational interactions between the bar and the other components of galaxies, it…

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…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2015-06-03 Robert J. J. Grand , Daisuke Kawata , Mark Cropper

Tidal forces acting on galaxies in clusters lead to a strong dynamical evolution. In order to quantify the amount of evolution, I run self-consistent N-body simulations of disk galaxies for a variety of models in the hierarchically forming…

Astrophysics · Physics 2008-11-26 Oleg Y. Gnedin

Recent observational constraints restrict the strict applicability of stellar dynamics in spirals to a few rotation periods. However, stellar dynamics concepts such as periodic orbits are invaluable for understanding the various dynamical…

Astrophysics · Physics 2008-02-03 D. Pfenniger

Gaia recently revealed a two-armed spiral pattern in the vertical phase-space distribution of the inner Galactic disk (guiding radius $R_\textrm{g} \sim 6.2$ kpc), indicating that some non-adiabatic perturbation symmetric about the…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2025-10-22 Rimpei Chiba , Neige Frankel , Chris Hamilton

We study transient spiral structures in an isothermal, thin, galactic disc. We find no instability that can grow everywhere from infinitesimal disturbances, but spiral structure does grow in the disc due to an arbitrarily strong,…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2012-11-07 Richard N Henriksen

Hydrodynamic simulations suggest that galactic gas disks form when coplanar gas spirals into the inner regions of the disk. We recently presented a simple "modified accretion disk" model of viscous galactic disks in which star-formation is…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2023-03-01 Enci Wang , Simon J. Lilly
‹ Prev 1 3 4 5 6 7 10 Next ›