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Spiral arms are the defining features of broad morphological classes of disc galaxies, but their nature and influence on galaxy evolution is still under debate. A key diagnostic for their nature is the spiral arm pattern speed: the radial…

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics · Physics 2025-12-22 Robert J. J. Grand , Martin Roth

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…

Spiral arms are one of the most important features used to classify the morphology of local galaxies. The cosmic epoch when spiral arms first appeared contains essential clues to the evolution of disk galaxies. In this letter, we used James…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2024-04-24 Vicki Kuhn , Yicheng Guo , Alec Martin , Julianna Bayless , Ellie Gates , AJ Puleo

The dependence of star formation efficiency (SFE) on galactic structures, especially whether the SFE in the bar region is lower than those in the other regions, has recently been debated. We report the SFEs of 18 nearby gas-rich massive…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2023-01-25 Fumiya Maeda , Fumi Egusa , Kouji Ohta , Yusuke Fujimoto , Asao Habe

We investigate the thermodynamics of the ISM and the formation of molecular hydrogen through numerical simulations of spiral galaxies. The model follows the chemical, thermal and dynamical response of the disc to an external spiral…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-11-13 Clare Dobbs , Simon Glover , Paul Clark , Ralf Klessen

We study the relationship between the gas column density (Sigma_HI) and the star formation rate surface density (Sigma_SFR) for a sample of extremely small (M_B ~ -13, Delta V_50 ~ 30 km/s) dwarf irregular galaxies. We find a clear…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2014-09-04 Sambit Roychowdhury , Jayaram N. Chengalur , Serafim S. Kaisin , Ayesha Begum , Igor D. Karachentsev

With the use of a background Milky-Way-like potential model, we performed stellar orbital and magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulations. As a first experiment, we studied the gaseous response to a bisymmetric spiral arm potential: the widely…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2015-05-21 Angeles Pérez-Villegas , Gilberto C. Gómez , Bárbara Pichardo

Enhanced star formation (SF) with star-forming neighboring galaxies bolsters hydrodynamical contributions during paired interactions. Although the relative spin orientation between interacting galaxies can influence this effect, it has not…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2025-10-28 Woong-Bae G. Zee , Jun-Sung Moon , Sanjaya Paudel , Suk-Jin Yoon

Recent JWST observations have revealed the prevalence of spiral structures at $z > 1$. Unlike in the local Universe, the origin and the consequence of spirals at this epoch remain unexplored. We use public JWST/NIRCam data from the…

We investigate dynamical states of grand-design spiral arms in three local galaxies: M51, NGC3627 and NGC628. Based on linear perturbation analysis considering multiple components in the galaxies, we compute instability parameters of the…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2021-06-30 Shigeki Inoue , Toshinobu Takagi , Atsushi Miyazaki , Erin Mentuch Cooper , Fumi Egusa , Hidenobu Yajima

We present numerical simulations of the passage of clumpy gas through a galactic spiral shock, the subsequent formation of giant molecular clouds (GMCs) and the triggering of star formation. The spiral shock forms dense clouds while…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-11-11 Ian A. Bonnell

We report measurements of trigonometric parallaxes for six high-mass star-forming regions in the Scutum spiral arm of the Milky Way as part of the BeSSeL Survey. Combining our measurements with 10 previous measurements from the BeSSeL…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2015-06-22 M. Sato , Y. W. Wu , K. Immer , B. Zhang , A. Sanna , M. J. Reid , T. M. Dame , A. Brunthaler , K. M. Menten

Spiral patterns in some disc galaxies have two arms in the centre, and three or more arms on the periphery. The same result is also obtained in numerical simulations of stellar and gaseous discs. We argue that such patterns may occur due to…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2018-01-10 Lubov Spiegel , Evgeny Polyachenko

According to observations and numerical simulations, the Milky Way could exhibit several spiral arm modes with multiple pattern speeds, wherein the slower patterns are located at larger Galactocentric distances. Our aim is to quantify the…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2023-12-20 E. Spitoni , G. Cescutti , A. Recio-Blanco , I. Minchev , E. Poggio , P. A. Palicio , F. Matteucci , S. Peirani , M. Barbillon , A. Vasini

Numerical simulations predict that clumps ($\sim$1 pc) should form stars at high efficiency to produce bound star clusters. We conducted a statistical study of 17 nearby cluster-forming clumps to examine the star formation rate and gas mass…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2025-05-16 V. Rawat , M. R. Samal , A. Zavagno , Sami Dib , Davide Elia , J. Jose , D. K. Ojha , K. Srivastav1

Studying the nature of spiral arms is essential for understanding the formation of the intricate disc structure of the Milky Way. The European Space Agency's Gaia mission has provided revolutionary observational data that have uncovered…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2024-08-28 Natsuki Funakoshi , Noriyuki Matsunaga , Daisuke Kawata , Junichi Baba , Daisuke Taniguchi , Michiko Fujii

We discuss a model for the Milky Way obtained by fitting the observed terminal velocities with the radial acceleration relation. The resulting stellar surface density profile departs from a smooth exponential disk, having bumps and wiggles…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2019-11-06 Stacy McGaugh

We present simulations of the formation and evolution of clusters in spiral arms. The simulations follow two different spiral arm regions, and the total gas mass is varied to produce a range of different mass clusters. We find that…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2022-09-14 C. L. Dobbs , T. J. R. Bending , A. R. Pettitt , A. S. M. Buckner , M. R. Bate

We analyze the motion of stars in the direction perpendicular to the galactic plane following a spiral arm passage. We show that the fast change in the vertical galactic potential causes a thermalized distribution to develop a distinctive…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2016-06-09 Nir J. Shaviv

The angular-momentum distribution of classical Cepheids in the outer Milky Way disc is bi-modal with a gap at $L_\mathrm{gap}=2950\,\mathrm{km}\,\mathrm{s}^{-1}\,\mathrm{kpc}$, corresponding to $R=13\,\mathrm{kpc}$, while no similar feature…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2022-12-14 Marcin Semczuk , Walter Dehnen , Ralph Schoenrich , E. Athanassoula