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Related papers: Spontaneous spirals in vibrated granular chains

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This paper continues a series reporting different aspects of the behaviour of disc galaxy simulations that support spiral instabilities. The focus in this paper is to demonstrate how linear spiral instabilities saturate and decay, and how…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2023-03-08 J A Sellwood , R G Carlberg

Fragmentation of a spiral arm is thought to drive the formation of giant clumps in galaxies. Using linear perturbation analysis for self-gravitating spiral arms, we derive an instability parameter and define the conditions for clump…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2017-12-27 Shigeki Inoue , Naoki Yoshida

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…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2015-06-04 Elena D'Onghia , Mark Vogelsberger , Lars Hernquist

We discuss the physical mechanism by which pure vertical bending waves in a stellar disc evolve to form phase space spirals similar to those discovered by Antoja et al. ( arXiv:1804.10196) in Gaia Data Release 2. These spirals were found by…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2019-01-01 Keir Darling , Lawrence M. Widrow

I developed an efficient numerical method for obtaining the gravitational potential of razor-thin spiral perturbations and used it to assess the standard tight-winding approximation, which is found to be reasonably accurate for pitch angles…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2025-10-22 Walter Dehnen

Spiral wave solutions are found in linear and weakly nonlinear irrotational water wave equations. These unsteady spiral waves evolve from suitable initial conditions; they are not induced by external forcing. In the linear case, a long-time…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2025-10-27 Mark J. Ablowitz , Justin T. Cole , Sean D. Nixon

Spirals are common in Nature: the snail's shell and the ordering of seeds in the sunflower are amongst the most widely-known occurrences. While these are static, dynamic spirals can also be observed in excitable systems such as heart…

Dynamical Systems · Mathematics 2007-05-23 Patrick Boily

We describe a series of experiments and computer simulations on vibrated granular media in a geometry chosen to eliminate gravitationally induced settling. The system consists of a collection of identical spherical particles on a horizontal…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2009-11-10 P. Melby , F. Vega Reyes , A. Prevost , R. Robertson , P. Kumar , D. A. Egolf , J. S. Urbach

We describe simulations of the response of a gaseous disc to an active spiral potential. The potential is derived from an N-body calculation and leads to a multi-armed time-evolving pattern. The gas forms long spiral arms typical of grand…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-11-13 Clare Dobbs , Ian Bonnell

Using 2D nonlinear simulations, we study the generation and nonlinear evolution of spiral structure in a star-forming multi-component gravitating disk. We confirm in agreement with previous studies the destabilizing role of a cold gaseous…

Astrophysics · Physics 2007-05-23 Vladimir Korchagin , Christian Theis

Gravity is scale free. Thus gravity may form similar structures in self-gravitating systems on different scales. Indeed, observations of the interstellar medium, spiral disks and cosmic structures, reveal similar characteristics. The…

Astrophysics · Physics 2007-05-23 Daniel Huber , Daniel Pfenniger

It is well established that many galaxies, like our Milky Way, exhibit spiral patterns. The entire galactic disc rotates about the galactic centre with different speeds; higher closer to the centre, lower at greater distances - that is,…

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology · Physics 2016-02-16 A. Rustamov , J. N. Rustamov

We investigate the formation of substructure in spiral galaxies using global MHD simulations, including gas self-gravity. Our models extend previous local models by Kim and Ostriker (2002) by including the full effects of curvilinear…

Astrophysics · Physics 2011-02-11 Rahul Shetty , Eve C. Ostriker

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.…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2024-01-29 Chris Hamilton

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…

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics · Physics 2021-03-24 Hans Baehr , Zhaohuan Zhu

We report the experimental observation of a square crystalline phase in a vibrated binary mixture of spherical grains. This structure spontaneously forms from a disordered state, consistently with predictions obtained in an equilibrium…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2025-12-09 A. Plati , R. Maire , F. Boulogne , F. Restagno , F. Smallenburg , G. Foffi

In this paper we suggest the existence in the central regions of spiral galaxies of collisionless, scale-free, rigidly rotating, self-gravitating discs with spiral symmetry. Such discs must be truncated at a finite radius, and they must be…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2011-10-27 R. N. Henriksen

We present K'(2.1 micron) observations of four nearby flocculent spirals, which clearly show low-level spiral structure and suggest that kiloparsec-scale spiral structure is more prevalent in flocculent spirals than previously supposed. In…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-10-28 Michele D. Thornley

Spirals shocks have been widely studied in the context of galactic dynamics and protostellar discs. They may however also play an important role in some classes of close binary stars, and more particularly in cataclysmic variables. In this…

Astrophysics · Physics 2007-05-23 Henri M. J. Boffin

Experiments on a thin layer of cohesive wet granular matter under vertical vibrations reveal kink separated domains that collide with the container at different phases. Due to the strong cohesion arising from the formation of liquid bridges…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2015-07-13 Lorenz Butzhammer , Simeon Völkel , Ingo Rehberg , Kai Huang