Spiral Structure Dynamics in Pure Stellar Disk Models

TL;DR

This study uses large-scale N-body simulations to explore how different initial conditions affect the formation and evolution of non-steady spiral arms in pure stellar disk galaxy models.

Contribution

It provides new insights into the physical mechanisms driving spiral structure dynamics by systematically varying initial velocity dispersion and disk thickness.

Findings

Spiral arms exhibit transient, recurrent behavior.

Disk stability depends on velocity dispersion and scale height.

Results support density wave and swing amplification theories.

Abstract

In order to understand the physical mechanism underlying non-steady stellar spiral arms in disk galaxies we performed a series of N-body simulations with 1.2 and 8 million particles. The initial conditions were chosen to follow Kuijken-Dubinski models. In this work we present the results of a sub-sample of our simulations in which we experiment with different disk central radial velocity dispersion and the disk scale height.