Effects of Non-Circular Motions on Azimuthal Color Gradients

TL;DR

This study investigates how non-circular gas motions in spiral arms affect the measurement of pattern speeds, revealing systematic biases and confirming that spirals likely end at the Outer Lindblad Resonance.

Contribution

It combines semi-analytical and MHD simulations to quantify biases in pattern speed measurements caused by non-circular motions in spiral galaxies.

Findings

Ignoring non-circular motions leads to overestimating pattern speeds inside corotation.

Image processing methods tend to underestimate pattern speeds regardless of gas kinematics.

Results support that spiral arms end at the Outer Lindblad Resonance.

Abstract

Assuming that density waves trigger star formation, and that young stars preserve the velocity components of the molecular gas where they are born, we analyze the effects that non-circular gas orbits have on color gradients across spiral arms. We try two approaches, one involving semi-analytical solutions for spiral shocks, and another with magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) numerical simulation data. We find that, if non-circular motions are ignored, the comparison between observed color gradients and stellar population synthesis models would in principle yield pattern speed values that are systematically too high for regions inside corotation, with the difference between the real and the measured pattern speeds increasing with decreasing radius. On the other hand, image processing and pixel averaging result in systematically lower measured spiral pattern speed values, regardless of the kinematics of stellar orbits. The net effect is that roughly the correct pattern speeds are recovered, although the trend of higher measured $\Omega_p$ at lower radii (as expected when non-circular motions exist but are neglected) should still be observed. We examine the Martinez-Garcia et al. (2009) photometric data and confirm that this is indeed the case. The comparison of the size of the systematic pattern speed offset in the data with the predictions of the semi-analytical and MHD models corroborates that spirals are more likely to end at Outer Lindblad Resonance, as these authors had already found.