Related papers: MEASURING SPIRAL ARM TORQUES: RESULTS FOR M100
Some galactic theories of spiral arms predict an offset between different tracers of star formation. Our goal here is to find such an offset between the observed location of radio masers and the location of the arms, using a recent 4-arm…
Spiral arms are distinctive features of many circumstellar disks, observed in scattered light, which traces the disk surface, millimeter dust emission, which probes the disk midplane, as well as molecular emission. The two leading…
We propose a new dynamical picture of galactic stellar and gas spirals, based on hydrodynamic simulations in a `live' stellar disk. We focus especially on spiral structures excited in a isolated galactic disk without a stellar bar. Using…
A method which we have developed for determining corotation radii, has allowed us to map in detail the radial resonant structures of barred spiral galaxies. Here we have combined this information with new determinations of the bar strength…
In order to understand the physical mechanism underlying non-steady stellar spiral arms in disk galaxies we performed a series of N-body simulations with 1.2 and 8 million particles. The initial conditions were chosen to follow…
The density wave theory predicted some physical offsets among different tracers of star formation. To test this prediction, here we compiled data on 40 galaxies searched observationally for a physical offset between spiral arm tracers, and…
The dynamical nature and formation mechanism(s) of galactic spiral arms remain long-standing problems in astrophysics. Most theoretical work is based on analytic calculations or idealised simulations, which has yielded several theories of…
We report the existence of spiral arms in the recently formed gaseous and dusty disk of the closest giant elliptical, NGC 5128 (Centaurus A), using high resolution 12CO(2-1) observations of the central 3 arcmin (3 kpc) obtained with the…
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…
Recently, it has been shown that a correlation exists between the rate of shear and the spiral arm pitch angle in disk galaxies. The rate of shear depends upon the shape of the rotation curve, which is dependent upon the mass distribution…
We study how well the complex gas velocity fields induced by massive spiral arms are modelled by the hydrodynamical simulations we used to constrain the dark matter fraction in nearby spiral galaxies (Kranz et al. 2001, 2003). More…
The rotation curve is significant to research on dark matter and the structure of the Milky Way. But it is a great challenge to measure rotation curve accurately, and different ways obtain distinct results. In this work, we use a DIY small…
Star clusters provide unique advantages for investigating Galactic spiral arms, particularly due to their precise ages, positions, and kinematic properties, which are further enhanced by ongoing updates from the astrometric data. In this…
The Galactic center of the Milky-Way harbors a massive black hole (BH) orbited by a diverse population of young and old stars. A significant fraction of the youngest stars ($\sim4-7$ Myr) reside in a thin stellar disk with puzzling…
Spiral structures are important drivers of the secular evolution of disc galaxies, however, the origin of spiral arms and their effects on the development of galaxies remain mysterious. In this work, we present two three-armed spiral…
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…
In the inner 3kpc of M51 we find that logarithmic spirals provide good fits to the peak intensities in molecular gas observed by BIMA in the CO (J=1-0) emission line along the spiral arms. However, we measure significant asymmetries between…
We measure the pitch angle ($\varphi$) of spiral arms in a sample of 79 galaxies to perform a systematic study of the dependence of $\varphi$ on galaxy morphology, mass, and kinematics to investigate the physical origin of spiral arms. We…
We discuss the properties of spiral arms in a N-body simulation of a barred galaxy and present evidence that these are manifold-driven. The strongest evidence comes from following the trajectories of individual particles. Indeed, these move…
In the solar-neighbourhood, older stars have larger random velocities than younger ones. It is argued that the increase in velocity dispersion with time is predominantly a gradual process rather than one induced by discrete events such as…