Related papers: Density-Wave Spiral Theories in the 1960s. II
With the arrival of computers, plasma physics and several fresh investigators by the early 1960s, understanding the spiral structure of galaxies entered a new stage of unusually vigorous activity broadly grouped under the umbrella marked…
Aside from the grand-design stellar spirals appearing in the disk of M81, a pair of stellar spiral arms situated well inside the bright bulge of M81 has been recently discovered by Kendall et al. (2008). The seemingly unrelated pairs of…
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…
The theoretical understanding of density waves in disk galaxies starts from the classical WKB perturbative analysis of tight-winding perturbations, the key assumption being that the potential due to the density wave is approximately radial.…
After a short review of the principal theories of spiral structure in galaxies, I describe two new developments. First, it now seems clear that linear theory cannot yield a full description for the development of spiral patterns because…
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 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 elaborate on a criterion for the emergence of instability in the fundamental mode recently observed by Cheung {\it et al.}, as a universal phenomenon in the context of black hole perturbations. Such instability is characterized by an…
This paper addresses resonantly forced spiral density waves in a dense planetary ring which is close to the threshold for viscous overstability. We solve numerically the hydrodynamical equations for a dense, axisymmetric thin disk in the…
The most important theory of the spiral arms of galaxies is the density wave theory based on the Lin-Shu dispersion relation. However, the density waves move with the group velocity towards the inner Lindblad resonance and tend to…
Spiral wave, whose rotation center can be regarded as a point defect, widely exists in various two dimensional excitable systems. In this paper, by making use of \emph{Duan's topological current theory}, we obtain the charge density of…
In recent years, several protoplanetary discs have been observed to exhibit spirals, both in scattered light and (sub)millimetre continuum data. The HD 100453 binary star system hosts such a disc around its primary. Previous work has argued…
Observations and simulations of barred spiral galaxies have shown that, in general, the spiral arms rotate at a different pattern speed to that of the bar. The main conclusion from the bibliography is that the bar rotates faster than the…
Spiral density waves can arise in galactic disks as linear instabilities of the underlying stellar distribution function. Such an instability grows exponentially in amplitude at some fixed growth rate $\beta$ before saturating nonlinearly.…
The ``galactic shocks'' \citep{fujimoto68,roberts69} is investigated using a full three-dimensional hydrodynamic simulations, taking into account self-gravity of the ISM, radiative cooling, and star formation followed by energy feedback…
The shearing sheet model of a galactic disk is studied anew. The theoretical description of its dynamics is based on three building blocks: Stellar orbits, which are described here in epicyclic approximation, the collisionless Boltzmann…
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…
The exact nature of the arms of spiral galaxies is still an open question. It has been widely assumed that spiral arms in galaxies with two distinct symmetrical arms are the products of density waves that propagate around the disk, with the…
An earlier paper presented the potentially significant discovery that disturbances in simplified simulations of a stellar disc model that was predicted to be stable in linear theory grew to large amplitude over a long period of time. The…
In spiral galaxies, the pitch angle, $\alpha$, of the spiral arms is often proposed as a discriminator between theories for the formation of the spiral structure. In Lin-Shu density wave theory, $\alpha$ stays constant in time, being simply…