The Contribution of Spiral Arms to the Thick Disk along the Hubble Sequence

Abstract

The first mechanism invoked to explain the existence of the thick disk in the Milky Way Galaxy, were the spiral arms. Up-to-date work summon several other possibilities that together seem to better explain this component of our Galaxy. All these processes must affect differently in distinct types of galaxies, but the contribution of each one has not been straightforward to quantify. In this work, we present a first comprehensive study of the effect of the spiral arms in the formation of thick disks, as going from early to late type disk galaxies, in an attempt to characterize and quantify this specific mechanism in galactic potentials. To this purpose, we perform numerical simulations of test particles in a three-dimensional spiral galaxy potential of normal spiral galaxies (from early to late types). By varying the parameters of the spiral arms we found that the vertical heating of the stellar disk becomes very important in some cases, and strongly depends on the galaxy morphology, pitch angle, arms mass and its pattern speed. The later the galaxy type, the larger is the effect on the disk heating. This study shows that the physical mechanism causing the vertical heating is different from simple resonant excitation. The spiral pattern induce chaotic behavior not linked necessarily to resonances but to direct scattering of disk stars, which leads to an increase of the velocity dispersion. We applied this study to the specific example of the Milky Way Galaxy, for which we have also added an experiment that includes the Galactic bar. From this study we deduce that the effect of spiral arms of a Milky-Way-like potential, on the dynamical vertical heating of the disk is negligible, unlike later galactic potentials for disks.

arXiv comment18 pages, 24 figures, 3 tables. Accepted for publication in ApJ

References in corpus (62)

• Radial Mixing in Galactic Discs
• Rotation Curves of Spiral Galaxies
• The Geneva-Copenhagen Survey of the Solar neighbourhood III. Improved distances, ages, and kinematics
• Local kinematics of K and M giants from Coravel/Hipparcos/Tycho-2 data. Revisiting the concept of superclusters
• The Distribution of Nearby Stars in Velocity Space Inferred from Hipparcos Data
• The photometric structure of the inner Galaxy
• Structural Parameters of Thin and Thick Disks in Edge-On Disk Galaxies
• Sinking Satellites and the Heating of Galaxy Discs
• COBE's Galactic Bar and Disk
• Bulge n and B/T in High Mass Galaxies: Constraints on the Origin of Bulges in Hierarchical Models
• Spiral arms, bar shape and bulge microlensing in the Milky Way
• A First Constraint on the Thick Disk Scale Length: Differential Radial Abundances in K Giants at Galactocentric Radii 4, 8, and 12 kpc
• Radial Migration Does Little for Galactic Disc Thickening
• The dynamics of stars around spiral arms
• The stellar velocity distribution in the solar neighbourhood
• Radial Migration in Disk Galaxies I: Transient Spiral Structure and Dynamics
• Vertical distribution of Galactic disk stars IV - AMR and AVR from clump giants
• The Age of the Solar Neighbourhood
• The dominant epoch of star formation in the Milky Way formed the thick disc
• Thickening of galactic disks through clustered star formation
• The dynamics of spiral arms in pure stellar disks
• Structure in phase space associated with spiral and bar density waves in an N-body galactic disk
• Thick disks of edge-on galaxies seen through the Spitzer Survey of Stellar Structure in Galaxies (S4G): Lair of missing baryons?
• Radial and vertical flows induced by galactic spiral arms: likely contributors to our "wobbly Galaxy''
• The structure of spiral galaxies - II. Near-infrared properties of spiral arms
• Re-visiting the relations: Galactic thin disc age-velocity dispersion relation
• Overlapping abundance gradients and azimuthal gradients related to the spiral structure of the Galaxy
• Heating of Galactic Disks by Infalling Satellites
• The distribution of nearby stars in phase space mapped by Hipparcos III. Clustering and streaming among A-F type stars
• Disk heating by more than one spiral density wave
• Determining Star Formation Timescale and Pattern Speed in Nearby Spiral Galaxies
• Simulations of the heating of the Galactic stellar disc
• Dissecting simulated disc galaxies II: the age-velocity relation
• Stellar Kinematic Constraints on Galactic Structure Models Revisited: Bar and Spiral Arm Resonances
• Dark Matter and Stellar Mass in the Luminous Regions of Disk Galaxies
• On the age heterogeneity of the Pleiades, Hyades and Sirius moving groups
• Halo Substructure and Disk Heating in a Lambda CDM Universe
• Models for the Gravitational Field of the Galactic Bar. An Application to Stellar Orbits in the Galactic Plane and Orbits of Some Globular Clusters
• Formation history, structure and dynamics of discs and spheroids in simulated Milky Way mass galaxies
• The Effects of Radial Migration on the Vertical Structure of Galactic Discs
• Gravitational torques in spiral galaxies: gas accretion as a driving mechanism of galactic evolution
• The Lifetimes of Spiral Patterns in Disc Galaxies
• The Kinematics of Thick Disks in Nine External Galaxies
• Constraining dark matter halo profiles and galaxy formation models using spiral arm morphology. I. Method outline
• Nonlinear Effects in Models of the Galaxy: 1. Midplane Stellar Orbits in the Presence of 3D Spiral Arms
• On the galaxy spiral arms' nature as revealed by rotation frequencies
• The effect of bars and transient spirals on the vertical heating in disk galaxies
• Pattern Speeds of Bars and Spiral Arms From H-alpha Velocity Fields
• The Onset of Spiral Structure in the Universe
• Gas and Stellar Motions and Observational Signatures of Co-Rotating Spiral Arms
• Chemically tagging the Hyades stream: Does it partly originate from the Hyades cluster?
• Relaxation in N-body simulations of disk galaxies
• Orbits of radial migrators and non-migrators around a spiral arm in N-body simulations
• The formation of a thick disk through the heating of a thin disk: Agreement with orbital eccentricities of stars in the solar neighborhood
• Disk heating agents across the Hubble sequence
• Pattern speed of main spiral arms in NGC 2997: Estimate based on very young stellar complexes
• Properties of thick discs formed in clumpy galaxies
• Density waves in the shearing sheet III. Disc heating
• Pitch Angle Restrictions in Late Type Spiral Galaxies Based on Chaotic and Ordered Orbital Behavior
• Stellar Orbital Studies in Normal Spiral Galaxies I: Restrictions to the Pitch Angle
• Stellar dynamics around transient co-rotating spiral arms
• Kinematic groups across the MW disc: insights from models and from the RAVE catalogue

Cited by in corpus (17)

• Gas kinematics, morphology, and angular momentum in the FIRE simulations
• Age velocity dispersion relations and heating histories in disc galaxies
• The age-velocity dispersion relation of the Galactic discs from LAMOST-Gaia data
• Fundamental relations for the velocity dispersion of stars in the Milky Way
• The quiescent phase of galactic disc growth
• A method to estimate stellar ages from kinematical data
• The most ancient spiral galaxy: a 2.6-Gyr-old disk with a tranquil velocity field
• Dynamics and Morphology of the Milky Way Spiral Arms from the Metallicity Distribution and Radial Mixing
• New insights in the origin and evolution of the old, metal-rich open cluster NGC 6791
• Revealing the spiral arms through radial migration and the shape of the Metallicity Distribution Function
• Can ultralight dark matter explain the age-velocity dispersion relation of the Milky Way disc: A revised and improved treatment
• How the bar properties affect the induced spiral structure
• The imprint of arms and bars on rotation curves: in-plane and off-plane
• Dynamics of thick, open spirals in Perlas potentials
• Through Thick and Thin: The Cosmic Evolution of Disk Scale Height
• Signatures of simulated spiral arms on radial actions
• Mapping the Milky Way with Gaia Bp/Rp spectra-IV: the broken and asymmetric density profile of the stellar disk traced by a large sample of red clumps