Related papers: Spontaneous spirals in vibrated granular chains
Spiral galaxies have distinct internal structures including a stellar bulge, disk and spiral arms. It is unknown when in cosmic history these structures formed. We analyze observations of BRI 1335-0417, an intensely star-forming galaxy in…
A fascinating class of patterns, often encountered in nature as meandering cracks on rocks, dried-out fields and tectonic plates is produced by the fracture of solids. Here we report the observation and modeling of an unusual type of…
Spiral waves in active media react to small perturbations as particle-like objects. Here we apply the asymptotic theory to the interaction of spiral waves with a localized inhomogeneity, which leads to a novel prediction: drift of the…
When granular mixtures of different sizes are fluidized, each species spontaneously separates and condenses to form patterns. Although granular segregation has been extensively studied, the inability to directly observe the time evolution…
We report the experimental observation of novel vortex patterns in vertically vibrated granular rods. Above a critical packing fraction, moving ordered domains of nearly vertical rods spontaneously form and coexist with horizontal rods. The…
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…
We present Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) simulations of the response of gas discs to a spiral potential. These simulations show that the commonly observed spurs and feathering in spiral galaxies can be understood as being due to…
In a weakly excitable medium, characterized by a large threshold stimulus, the free end of an isolated broken plane wave (wave tip) can either rotate (steadily or unsteadily) around a large excitable core, thereby producing a spiral…
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…
In the presence of a strong $m=2$ component in a rotating galaxy, the phase space structure near corotation is shaped to a large extent by the {\it invariant manifolds} of the short period family of unstable periodic orbits terminating at…
It is discussed that the formation of the spiral galaxies is driven by the cosmic background rotation, not a result of an isolated evolution proposed by the density wave theory. To analyze the motions of the galaxies, a simple double…
In the mean field limit, isolated gravitational systems often evolve towards a steady state through a violent relaxation phase. One question is to understand the nature of this relaxation phase, in particular the role of radial…
In order to address the question of whether spiral disturbances in galaxy discs are gravitationally coupled to the halo, we conduct simulations of idealized models of disc galaxies. We compare growth rates of spiral instabilities in…
We investigate fractal aspects of elliptical polynomial spirals; that is, planar spirals with differing polynomial rates of decay in the two axis directions. We give a full dimensional analysis of these spirals, computing explicitly their…
We investigate experimentally the distribution of configurations of a ring with an elementary topological constraint, a ``figure-8'' twist. Using vibrated granular chains, which permit controlled preparation and direct observation of such a…
We report on the decay of a passive scalar in chaotic mixing protocols where the wall of the vessel is rotated, or a net drift of fluid elements near the wall is induced at each period. As a result the fluid domain is divided into a central…
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…
The classical picture of a star-forming filament is a near-equilibrium structure, with collapse dependent on its gravitational criticality. Recent observations have complicated this picture, revealing filaments as a mess of apparently…
We perform axisymmetric hydrodynamical simulations that describe the nonlinear outcome of the viscous overstability in dense planetary rings. These simulations are particularly relevant for Cassini observations of fine-scale structure in…
Direct imaging observations have revealed spiral structures in protoplanetary disks. Previous studies have suggested that planet-induced spiral arms cannot explain some of these spiral patterns, due to the large pitch angle and high…