Related papers: Swing Amplification and the Gaia Phase Spirals
The distribution of stars in the Milky Way disc shows a spiral structure--the Snail--in the space of velocity and position normal to the Galactic mid-plane. The Snail appears as straight lines in the vertical frequency--vertical phase plane…
The causes of spiral structure in galaxies remain uncertain. Leaving aside the grand bisymmetric spirals with their own well-known complications, here we consider the possibility that multi-armed spiral features originate from density…
We develop an analytic theory to describe spiral density waves propagating in a shearing disc in the weakly nonlinear regime. Such waves are generically found to be excited in simulations of turbulent accretion disks, in particular if said…
Matter distribution models of the Milky Way galaxy are usually stationary, although there are known to be wave-like perturbations in the disc at $\sim10\%$ level of the total density. Modelling of the overall acceleration field by allowing…
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…
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…
We study particle dynamics in local two-dimensional simulations of self-gravitating accretion discs with a simple cooling law. It is well known that the structure which arises in the gaseous component of the disc due to a gravitational…
Spiral arms have been observed in nearly a dozen protoplanetary discs in near-infrared scattered light and recently also in the sub-millimetre continuum. While one of the most compelling explanations is that they are driven by planetary or…
We use test-particle integrations to show that epicyclic motions excited by a pericentre passage of a dwarf galaxy could account for bulk vertical velocity streaming motions recently observed in the Galactic stellar disc near the Sun. We…
Theoretical models of spiral arms suggest that the spiral arms provoke a vertical bulk motion in disc stars. By analysing the breathing motion, a coherent asymmetric vertical motion around the mid-plane of the Milky Way disc, with…
We argue that self-excited instabilities are the cause of spiral patterns in simulations of unperturbed stellar discs. In previous papers, we have found that spiral patterns were caused by a few concurrent waves, which we claimed were…
Spiral galaxies are observed to exhibit a range of morphologies, in particular in the shape of spiral arms. A key diagnostic parameter is the pitch angle, which describes how tightly wound the spiral arms are. Observationally and…
I discuss the dynamical interaction of galactic disks with the surrounding dark matter halos. In particular it is demonstrated that if the self-gravitating shearing sheet, a model of a patch of a galactic disk, is embedded in a live dark…
Spiral shocks are potentially a major source of turbulence in the interstellar medium. To address this problem quantitatively, we use numerical simulations to investigate gas flow across spiral arms in vertically stratified,…
We use global MHD galaxy simulations to investigate the effects of spiral arms on the evolution of magnetic fields and star formation within a self-regulated interstellar medium (ISM). The same galaxy is simulated twice: once with…
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 use an N-body simulation to study the 3-D density distribution of spirals, and the resulting stellar vertical velocities. Relative to the disc's rotation, the phase of the spiral's peak density away from the mid-plane trails that at the…
We compare the stellar motion around a spiral arm created in two different scenarios, transient/co-rotating spiral arms and density-wave-like spiral arms. We generate Gaia mock data from snapshots of the simulations following these two…
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,…
Context. Protoplanetary disks are known to host spiral features that are observed in scattered light, ALMA continuum and more recently in CO gas emission and gas dynamics. It is however unknown if spirals in gas and dust trace the same…