On the galaxy spiral arms' nature as revealed by rotation frequencies

Abstract

High resolution N-body simulations using different codes and initial condition techniques reveal two different behaviours for the rotation frequency of transient spiral arms like structures. Whereas unbarred disks present spiral arms nearly corotatingwith disk particles, strong barred models (bulged or bulge-less) quickly develop a bar-spiral structure dominant in density, with a pattern speed almost constant in radius. As the bar strength decreases the arm departs from bar rigid rotation and behaves similar to the unbarred case. In strong barred models we detect in the frequency space other subdominant and slower modes at large radii, in agreement with previous studies, however we also detect them in the configuration space. We propose that the distinctive behaviour of the dominant spiral modes can be exploited in order to constraint the nature of Galactic spiral arms by the astrometric survey GAIA and by 2-D spectroscopic surveys like CALIFA and MANGA in external galaxies.

Accepted 2013 April 12

References in corpus (4)

• Riding the Spiral Waves: Implications of Stellar Migration for the Properties of Galactic Disks
• The formation of spiral arms and rings in barred galaxies
• Invariant manifolds and the response of spiral arms in barred galaxies
• Stellar Migration by Short Lived Density Peaks Arising from Interference of Spiral Density Waves in an N-body Simulation

Cited by in corpus (22)

• Dawes Review 4: Spiral Structures in Disc Galaxies
• Transient spirals as superposed instabilities
• Effects of Gas on Formation and Evolution of Stellar Bars and Nuclear Rings in Disk Galaxies
• Gas and Stellar Motions and Observational Signatures of Co-Rotating Spiral Arms
• Galaxy Zoo and SpArcFiRe: Constraints on spiral arm formation mechanisms from spiral arm number and pitch angles
• Bars and spirals in tidal interactions with an ensemble of galaxy mass models
• The morphology of the Milky Way - II. Reconstructing CO maps from disc galaxies with live stellar distributions
• Constraints on Radial Migration in Spiral Galaxies I. Analytic Criterion for Capture at Corotation
• Tracing the Galactic spiral structure with embedded clusters
• Eventful Evolution of Giant Molecular Clouds in Dynamically Evolving Spiral Arms
• Radial distributions of arm-gas offsets as an observational test of spiral theories
• The stellar kinematics of co-rotating spiral arms in Gaia mock observations
• Young stars as tracers of a barred-spiral Milky Way
• The Contribution of Spiral Arms to the Thick Disk along the Hubble Sequence
• Non-circular Motions in the Outer Perseus Spiral Arm
• Effects of Spiral Arms on Star Formation in Nuclear Rings of Barred-spiral Galaxies
• The behavior of the pitch angle of spiral arms depending on optical wavelength
• The Impact of Stellar Migration on Disk Outskirts
• Stars with fast Galactic rotation observed in Gaia TGAS: a signature driven by the Perseus arm?
• Manifold spirals, disc-halo interactions and the secular evolution in N-body models of barred galaxies
• The shock-induced star formation sequence resulting from a constant spiral pattern speed
• Stellar physical parameters from Str ömgren photometry. Application to the young stars in the Galactic anticenter survey