We present the first radiative transfer (RT) model of a non-edge-on disk galaxy in which the large-scale geometry of stars and dust is self-consistently derived through fitting of multiwavelength imaging observations from the UV to the submm. To this end we used the axi-symmetric RT model of Popescu et al. and a new methodology for deriving geometrical parameters, and applied this to decode the{spectral energy distribution (SED) of M33. We successfully account for both the spatial and spectral energy distribution, with residuals typically within $7\%$ in the profiles of surface brightness and within $8\%$ in the spatially-integrated SED. We predict well the energy balance between absorption and re-emission by dust, with no need to invoke modified grain properties, and we find no submm emission that is in excess of our model predictions. We calculate that $80\pm8\%$ of the dust heating is powered by the young stellar populations. We identify several morphological components in M33, a nuclear, an inner, a main and an outer disc, showing a monotonic trend in decreasing star-formation surface-density ($Σ_{\rm SFR}$) from the nuclear to the outer disc. In relation to surface density of stellar mass, the $Σ_{\rm SFR}$ of these components define a steeper relation than the "main sequence" of star-forming galaxies, which we call a "structurally resolved main sequence". Either environmental or stellar feedback mechanisms could explain the slope of the newly defined sequence. We find the star-formation rate to be ${\rm SFR}=0.28^{+0.02}_{-0.01}{\rm M}_{\odot}{\rm yr}^{-1}$.
Understanding the effect spiral structure has on star formation properties of galaxies is important to completing our picture of spiral structure evolution. Previous studies have investigated connections between spiral arm properties with star formation, but the effect that the number of spiral arms has on this process is unclear. Here we use the Galaxy and Mass Assembly (GAMA) survey paired with the citizen science visual classifications from the Galaxy Zoo project to explore galaxies' spiral arm number and how it connects to the star formation process. We use the votes from the GAMA-KiDS Gal…
Cosmic dust grains are one of the fundamental ingredients of the interstellar medium (ISM). In spite of their small contribution to the total mass budget, dust grains play a significant role in the physical and chemical evolution of galaxies. Over the past decades, a plethora of multi-wavelength data, from UV to far-infrared, has increased substantially our knowledge on the dust properties of nearby galaxies. Nevertheless, one regime of the spectrum, the mm range, remains relatively unexplored. Thanks to the new, high-resolution data in the mm range observed with the NIKA2 instrument and our r…
Spiral structure is ubiquitous in the Universe, and the pitch angle of arms in spiral galaxies provide an important observable in efforts to discriminate between different mechanisms of spiral arm formation and evolution. In this paper, we present a hierarchical Bayesian approach to galaxy pitch angle determination, using spiral arm data obtained through the Galaxy Builder citizen science project. We present a new approach to deal with the large variations in pitch angle between different arms in a single galaxy, which obtains full posterior distributions on parameters. We make use of our pitc…
Context: Dust reprocesses about half of the stellar radiation in galaxies. The thermal re-emission by dust of absorbed energy is considered driven merely by young stars and, consequently, often applied to trace the star formation rate in galaxies. Recent studies have argued that the old stellar population might anticipate a non-negligible fraction of the radiative dust heating. Aims: In this work, we aim to analyze the contribution of young (< 100 Myr) and old (~ 10 Gyr) stellar populations to radiative dust heating processes in the nearby grand-design spiral galaxy M51 using radiative transfe…
We study the vertical gradient in azimuthal velocity of spiral galaxy NGC 4244 in a thin disk model. With surface density accounting for the rotation curve, we model the gradient properties in the approximation of quasi-circular orbits and find the predictions to be consistent with the gradient properties inferred from measurements. This consistency may suggest that the mass distribution in this galaxy is flattened.
In this paper we study the morphological properties of spiral galaxies, including measurements of spiral arm number and pitch angle. Using Galaxy Zoo 2, a stellar mass-complete sample of 6,222 SDSS spiral galaxies is selected. We use the machine vision algorithm SpArcFiRe to identify spiral arm features and measure their associated geometries. A support vector machine classifier is employed to identify reliable spiral features, with which we are able to estimate pitch angles for half of our sample. We use these machine measurements to calibrate visual estimates of arm tightness, and hence esti…
We analyze the spiral structure that results in a numerical simulation of a galactic disk with stellar and gaseous components evolving in a potential that includes an axisymmetric halo and bulge. We perform a second simulation without the gas component to observe how it affects the spiral structure in the disk. To quantify this, we use a Fourier analysis and obtain values for the pitch angle and the velocity of the self-excited spiral pattern of the disk. The results show a tighter spiral in the simulation with gaseous component. The spiral structure is consistent with a superposition of waves…
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 particle galaxy model is considered and the Coriolis force formed by the rotational background is introduced. The numerical analysis shows that not only the trajectory of the particle is the spiral shape, but also the relationship between the velocity and the radius reveals both the existence of spiral arm and the change of the arm number. In addition, the results…
Theoretical studies on the response of interstellar gas to a gravitational potential disc with a quasi-stationary spiral arm pattern suggest that the gas experiences a sudden compression due to standing shock waves at spiral arms. This mechanism, called a galactic shock wave, predicts that gas spiral arms move from downstream to upstream of stellar arms with increasing radius inside a corotation radius. In order to investigate if this mechanism is at work in the grand-design spiral galaxy M51, we have measured azimuthal offsets between the peaks of stellar mass and gas mass distributions in it…
The majority of galaxies in the local Universe exhibit spiral structure with a variety of forms. Many galaxies possess two prominent spiral arms, some have more, while others display a many-armed flocculent appearance. Spiral arms are associated with enhanced gas content and star-formation in the disks of low-redshift galaxies, so are important in the understanding of star-formation in the local universe. As both the visual appearance of spiral structure, and the mechanisms responsible for it vary from galaxy to galaxy, a reliable method for defining spiral samples with different visual morpho…
We compare the observed radial velocity of different arm tracers, taken near the tangent to a spiral arm. A slight difference is predicted by the density wave theory, given the shock predicted at the entrance to the inner spiral arm. In many of these spiral arms, the observed velocity offset confirms the prediction of the density wave theory (with a separation between the maser velocity and the CO gas peak velocity, of about 20 km/s) - when the observed offset is bigger than the error estimates. The time to reach the next spiral arm is given.
We present the MATLAB code Spirality, a novel method for measuring spiral arm pitch angles by fitting galaxy images to spiral templates of known pitch. Computation time is typically on the order of 2 minutes per galaxy, assuming at least 8 GB of working memory. We tested the code using 117 synthetic spiral images with known pitches, varying both the spiral properties and the input parameters. The code yielded correct results for all synthetic spirals with galaxy-like properties. We also compared the code's results to two-dimensional Fast Fourier Transform (2DFFT) measurements for the sample of…
Using the Torus radiative transfer code we produce synthetic observations of the 21 cm neutral hydrogen line from an SPH simulation of a spiral galaxy. The SPH representation of the galaxy is mapped onto an AMR grid, and a ray tracing method is used to calculate 21 cm line emission for lines of sight through the AMR grid in different velocity channels and spatial pixels. The result is a synthetic spectral cube which can be directly compared to real observations. We compare our synthetic spectral cubes to observations of M31 and M33 and find good agreement, whereby increasing velocity channels …
Observations and simulations of barred spiral galaxies have shown that, in general, the spiral arms rotate at a different pattern speed to that of the bar. The main conclusion from the bibliography is that the bar rotates faster than the spiral arms with a double or even a triple value of angular velocity. The theory that prevails in explaining the formation of the spiral arms in the case of a barred spiral galaxy with two pattern speeds is the manifold theory, where the orbits that support the spiral density wave are chaotic, and are related to the manifolds emanating from the Lagrangian poin…
Spiral arms serve crucial purposes in star formation and galaxy evolution. In this paper, we report the identification of A2744-DSG-$z3$, a dusty, multiarm spiral galaxy at $z=3.059$ using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) NIRISS imaging and grism spectroscopy. A2744-DSG-$z3$ was discovered as a gravitationally lensed sub-millimeter galaxy with ALMA. This is the most distant stellar spiral structure seen thus far, consistent with cosmological simulations which suggest $z\approx3$ as the epoch when spirals emerge. Thanks to the gravitational lensing and excellent spatial resolution of JWST,…
The Galaxy Zoo has provided morphological data on many galaxies. Several biases have been identified in the Galaxy Zoo data. Here we report on a newly discovered selection effect: astronomers interested in studying spiral galaxies may select a set of spiral galaxies based upon a threshold in spirality (the fraction of Galaxy Zoo humans who report seeing spiral structure). SpArcFiRe is an automated tool that decomposes a spiral galaxy into its constituent spiral arms, providing objective, quantitative data on their structure. SpArcFiRe measures the pitch angle of spiral arms. We have observed t…
We report an integral-field spectroscopic (IFS) observation of a gravitationally lensed spiral galaxy A1689B11 at redshift $z=2.54$. It is the most ancient spiral galaxy discovered to date and the second kinematically confirmed spiral at $z\gtrsim2$. Thanks to gravitational lensing, this is also by far the deepest IFS observation with the highest spatial resolution ($\sim$ 400 pc) on a spiral galaxy at a cosmic time when the Hubble sequence is about to emerge. After correcting for a lensing magnification of 7.2 $\pm$ 0.8, this primitive spiral disk has an intrinsic star formation rate of 22 $\…
Super spirals are the most massive star-forming disk galaxies in the universe (Ogle et al. 2016, 2019). We measured rotation curves for 23 massive spirals and find a wide range of fast rotation speeds (240-570 km/s), indicating enclosed dynamical masses of 0.6 - 4E12 Msun. Super spirals with mass in stars log Mstars / Msun > 11.5 break from the baryonic Tully-Fisher relation (BTFR) established for lower mass galaxies. The BTFR power-law index breaks from 3.75 +/- 0.11 to 0.25 +/- 0.41 above a rotation speed of 340 km/s. Super spirals also have very high specific angular momenta that break from…
The study of the Milky Way structure is vital importance for a better understanding of the universe. This study digs deeper into the structure of Milky Way Galaxys with emphasis to its spiral arms. Multiple data sources were sought including the NASA websites. As found out, the Milky Way is a disk shaped galaxy composed of four spiral arms, two large and the rest are smaller. The spiral arms are regions of actively forming new stars dominated by young stars, dust and gas. Dust and gas are primary materials for the formation of new stars. This dust is also responsible for the reddish appearance…
For a sample of 4378 nearby spiral and S0 galaxies, Yu and Ho (2020) used Fourier analysis of Sloan Digital Sky Survey images to show that the strengths of the spiral arms and the pitch angles of the arms are inversely correlated with central concentration. In the current study, we search for trends in the Yu and Ho (2020) spiral arm parameters with environment and specific star formation rate (sSFR). When comparing galaxies with similar concentrations, we do not find a significant difference in the arm strengths or pitch angles of spiral galaxies in clusters compared to field galaxies. When d…
Interstellar dust absorbs stellar light very efficiently and thus shapes the energetic output of galaxies. Studying the impact of different stellar populations on the dust heating remains hard because it requires decoupling the relative geometry of stars and dust, and involves complex processes as scattering and non-local dust heating. We aim to constrain the relative distribution of dust and stellar populations in the spiral galaxy M81 and create a realistic model of the radiation field that describes the observations. Investigating the dust-starlight interaction on local scales, we want to q…
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 the distant Universe, at redshift 4.41. The [C II] gas kinematics show a steep velocity rise near the galaxy center and have a two-armed spiral morphology that extends from about 2 to 5 kiloparsecs in radius. We interpret these features as due to a central compact structure, such as a bulge, a rotating gas disk and either spiral arms or tidal tails. These fea…
Using observational data on the kinematical properties and density distributions of the subsystems of the Milky Way galaxy, we construct a set of multi-component equilibrium models of its disk. The dynamics of the disk is studied numerically using collisionless-gaseous numerical simulations. After approximately one Gyr, a prominent central bar is formed with a semi-axis of about three kiloparsecs. Outside the central regions, a multi-armed spiral pattern develops, which can be characterized by the superposition of m=2, 3 and 4-armed spiral patterns. The spiral structure and the bar exist for a…
We seek the conditions for a {\it steady} mean field galactic dynamo. The parameter set is reduced to those appearing in the $α^2$ and $α/ω$ dynamo, namely velocity amplitudes, and the ratio of sub-scale helicity to diffusivity. The parameters can be allowed to vary on conical spirals. We analyze the mean field dynamo equations in terms of scale invariant logarithmic spiral modes and special exact solutions. Compatible scale invariant gravitational spiral arms are introduced and illustrated in an appendix, but the detailed dynamical interaction with the magnetic field is left for another work.…
We present gas and stellar kinematics of a high-resolution zoom-in cosmological chemodynamical simulation, which fortuitously captures the formation and evolution of a star-forming barred spiral galaxy, from redshift $z\sim3$ to $z\sim2$ at the peak of the cosmic star formation rate. The galaxy disc grows by accreting gas and substructures from the environment. The spiral pattern becomes fully organised when the gas settles from a thick (with vertical dispersion $σ_{v} >$ 50 km/s) to a thin ($σ_{v} \sim 25$ km/s) disc component in less than 1 Gyr. Our simulated disc galaxy also has a central X…
We use classifications provided by citizen scientists though Galaxy Zoo to investigate the correlation between bulge size and arm winding in spiral galaxies. Whilst the traditional spiral sequence is based on a combination of both measures, and is supposed to favour arm winding where disagreement exists, we demonstrate that, in modern usage, the spiral classifications Sa-Sd are predominantly based on bulge size, with no reference to spiral arms. Furthermore, in a volume limited sample of galaxies with both automated and visual measures of bulge prominence and spiral arm tightness, there is at …
Spiral arms are common features in low-redshift disc galaxies, and are prominent sites of star-formation and dust obscuration. However, spiral structure can take many forms: from galaxies displaying two strong `grand design' arms, to those with many `flocculent' arms. We investigate how these different arm types are related to a galaxy's star-formation and gas properties by making use of visual spiral arm number measurements from Galaxy Zoo 2. We combine UV and mid-IR photometry from GALEX and WISE to measure the rates and relative fractions of obscured and unobscured star formation in a sampl…
The existence of spiral DRAGNs challenges standard galaxy formation theories. We present the first observation of 0313$-$192, the archetypal spiral DRAGN, at VLBI resolutions. Spiral DRAGNs are Double Radio Sources Associated with Galactic Nuclei (DRAGNs) that are hosted by spiral galaxies. 0313$-$192 is an edge-on spiral galaxy that appears to host a 360 kpc double-lobed radio source. The core of this galaxy is clearly detected at L, S, and X-bands using the VLBA, signifying an ongoing active nucleus in the galaxy. This rules out the possibility that the spiral DRAGN is merely a chance alignm…
Recent VLBI (Very Long Baseline Interferometer) observations determined the distances and proper motions of star-forming regions in spiral arms directly. They showed that star-forming regions and young stars have large peculiar motions, as large as 30 km/s with complex structures. Such a large peculiar motion is incompatible with the prediction of the standard theory of quasi-stationary spiral arms. We use a high-resolution, self-consistent N-body+hydrodynamical simulation to explore how the spiral arms are formed and maintained, and how star-forming regions move. We found that arms are not qu…
Turbulence plays an important role in the structure and dynamics of the galaxy and influences various processes therein including star formation. In this work, we investigate the large scale turbulence properties of the external spiral galaxy NGC 5236. We combine the VLA multi-configuration archival data with the new GMRT observation to estimate the column density and line of sight velocity fluctuation power spectra for this galaxy over almost two decades of length scales. The energy input scale to the ISM turbulence is found to be around $6$ kpc. Power spectra of the two-dimensional turbulenc…
The exact nature of the arms of spiral galaxies is still an open question. It has been widely assumed that spiral arms in galaxies with two distinct symmetrical arms are the products of density waves that propagate around the disk, with the spiral arms being visibly enhanced by the star formation that is triggered as the passing wave compresses gas in the galaxy disk. Such a persistent wave would propagate with an approximately constant angular speed, its pattern speed Op. The quasi-stationary density wave theory can be tested by measuring this quantity and showing that it does not vary with r…
Since the discovery that the majority of low-redshift galaxies exhibit some level of spiral structure, a number of theories have been proposed as to why these patterns exist. A popular explanation is a process known as swing amplification, yet there is no observational evidence to prove that such a mechanism is at play. By using a number of measured properties of galaxies, and scaling relations where there are no direct measurements, we model samples of SDSS and S$^4$G spiral galaxies in terms of their relative halo, bulge and disc mass and size. Using these models, we test predictions of swin…
We investigate the use of spiral arm pitch angles as a probe of disk galaxy mass profiles. We confirm our previous result that spiral arm pitch angles (P) are well correlated with the rate of shear (S) in disk galaxy rotation curves. We use this correlation to argue that imaging data alone can provide a powerful probe of galactic mass distributions out to large look-back times. We then use a sample of 13 galaxies, with Spitzer 3.6-$μ$m imaging data and observed H$α$ rotation curves, to demonstrate how an inferred shear rate coupled with a bulge-disk decomposition model and a Tully-Fisher-deriv…
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 s…
We use multi-wavelength data from the Galaxy and Mass Assembly (GAMA) survey to explore the cause of red optical colours in nearby (0.002<z<0.06) spiral galaxies. We show that the colours of red spiral galaxies are a direct consequence of some environment-related mechanism(s) which has removed dust and gas, leading to a lower star formation rate. We conclude that this process acts on long timescales (several Gyr) due to a lack of morphological transformation associated with the transition in optical colour. The sSFR and dust-to-stellar mass ratio of red spiral galaxies is found to be statistic…
Observations that span a broad range of wavelengths are used to examine asymmetries in the disk of the nearby late-type spiral galaxy NGC 247. The northern spiral arm is over-luminous at all wavelengths when compared with other parts of the galaxy at similar galactocentric radii, while the density of very luminous red stars in the void that is immediately south of this arm matches that in other parts of the disk at the same galactocentric radius. Two bubbles with spatial extents of many kpc are identified in the disk, and many of the young stars in the southern disk of NGC 247 are located in t…
We study the role of asymptotic curves in supporting the spiral structure of a N-body model simulating a barred spiral galaxy. Chaotic orbits with initial conditions on the unstable asymptotic curves of the main unstable periodic orbits follow the shape of the periodic orbits for an initial interval of time and then they are diffused outwards supporting the spiral structure of the galaxy. Chaotic orbits having small deviations from the unstable periodic orbits, stay close and along the corresponding unstable asymptotic manifolds, supporting the spiral structure for more than 10 rotations of th…
We have investigated the dynamics of the molecular gas and the evolution of GMAs in the spiral galaxy M51 with the NRO 45-m telescope. The velocity components of the molecular gas perpendicular and parallel to the spiral arms are derived at each spiral phase from the distribution of the line-of-sight velocity of the CO gas. In addition, the shear motion in the galactic disk is determined from the velocity vectors at each spiral phase. It is revealed that the distributions of the shear strength and of GMAs are anti-correlated. GMAs exist only in the area of the weak shear strength and further o…
We present an analysis of dust properties of a sample of close major-merger galaxy pairs selected by K_s magnitude and redshift. The pairs represent the two populations of spiral-spiral (S+S) and mixed morphology spiral-elliptical (S+E). The CIGALE (Code Investigating GALaxy Emission) is used to fit dust models to the 2MASS, WISE and Herschel flux density measurements and derive the parameters describing the PAH contribution, interstellar radiation field (ISRF) and photo-dissociation regions (PDRs). Model fits verify our previous Spitzer Space Telescope analysis that S+S and S+E pairs do not h…
We present the first complete, velocity-resolved [CII] 158um image of the M51 grand-design spiral galaxy, observed with the upGREAT instrument on SOFIA. [CII] is an important tracer of various phases of the interstellar medium (ISM), including ionized gas, neutral atomic, and diffuse molecular regions. We combine the [CII] data with HI, CO, 24um dust continuum, FUV, and near-infrared K-band observations to study the evolution of the ISM across M51's spiral arms in both position-position, and position-velocity space. Our data show strong velocity gradients in HI, 12CO, and [CII] at the location…
We investigate the kinematic signatures induced by spiral and bar structure in a set of simulations of Milky Way-sized spiral disc galaxies. The set includes test particle simulations that follow a quasi-stationary density wave-like scenario with rigidly rotating spiral arms, and $N$-body simulations that host a bar and transient, co-rotating spiral arms. From a location similar to that of the Sun, we calculate the radial, tangential and line-of-sight peculiar velocity fields of a patch of the disc and quantify the fluctuations by computing the power spectrum from a two-dimensional Fourier tra…
The spiral structure of a spiral galaxy can be seen through different observational tracers such as the dust in the interstellar medium, the free electrons in ionized regions, the molecular gas, or the atomic hydrogen in Hα regions. In this work, we use an N-body simulation with Magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) to investigate the spiral pattern and the star formation activity in the gas component of a disk galaxy. Some of the questions that we tackle include: how are galaxies observed through the different properties of the gas? Does the spiral structure of the galaxy change when we trace it with th…
We conduct spectral line survey observations in the 3 mm band toward a spiral arm, a bar-end, and a nuclear region of the nearby barred spiral galaxy NGC 3627 with the IRAM 30 m telescope and the Nobeyama 45 m telescope. Additional observations are performed toward the spiral arm and the bar-end in the 2 mm band. We detect 8, 11, and 9 molecular species in the spiral arm, the bar-end, and the nuclear region, respectively. Star-formation activities are different among the three regions, and in particular, the nucleus of NGC 3627 is known as a LINER/Seyfert 2 type nucleus. In spite of these phys…
A campaign is described, open to participation by interested AAVSO members, of follow-up observations for newly-discovered Cepheid variables in undersampled and obscured regions of the Galaxy. A primary objective being to use these supergiants to clarify the Galaxy's spiral nature. Preliminary multiband photometric observations are presented for three Cepheids discovered beyond the obscuring dust between the Cygnus & Aquila Rifts (40 \le l \le 50 degrees), a region reputedly tied to a segment of the Sagittarius-Carina arm which appears to cease unexpectedly. The data confirm the existence of e…
The challenge of consistent identification of internal structure in galaxies - in particular disc galaxy components like spiral arms, bars, and bulges - has hindered our ability to study the physical impact of such structure across large samples. In this paper we present Galaxy Zoo: 3D (GZ: 3D) a crowdsourcing project built on the Zooniverse platform which we used to create spatial pixel (spaxel) maps that identify galaxy centres, foreground stars, galactic bars and spiral arms for 29831 galaxies which were potential targets of the MaNGA survey (Mapping Nearby Galaxies at Apache Point Observat…
We address the nature and origin of a spiral disk at the center of NGC 1275, the giant elliptical galaxy at the center of the Perseus cluster, that spans a radius of $\sim$$5\,\rm kpc$. By comparing stellar absorption lines measured in long-slit optical spectra with synthetic spectra for single stellar populations, we find that fitting of these lines requires two stellar populations: (i) a very young population that peaks in radial velocity at $\pm 250 {\rm \, km \, s^{-1}}$ of the systemic velocity within a radius of $\sim$$720\,\rm pc$ of the nucleus, a $1\,σ$ velocity dispersion significant…
The distributions of the pairwise line-of-sight velocity between galaxies and their host clusters are segregated according to the galaxy's colour and morphology. We investigate the velocity distribution of red-spiral galaxies, which represents a rare population within galaxy clusters. We find that the probability distribution function of the pairwise line-of-sight velocity $v_{\rm{los}}$ between red-spiral galaxies and galaxy clusters has a dip at $v_{\rm{los}} = 0$, which is a very odd feature, at 93\% confidence level. To understand its origin, we construct a model of the phase space distrib…
Polarization is an important tool to further the understanding of interstellar dust and the sources behind it. In this paper we describe our implementation of polarization that is due to scattering of light by spherical grains and electrons in the dust Monte Carlo radiative transfer code SKIRT. In contrast to the implementations of other Monte Carlo radiative transfer codes, ours uses co-moving reference frames that rely solely on the scattering processes. It fully supports the peel-off mechanism that is crucial for the efficient calculation of images in 3D Monte Carlo codes. We develop reprod…
We use a high resolution cosmological zoom simulation of a Milky Way-sized halo to study the observable features in velocity and metallicity space associated with the dynamical influence of spiral arms. For the first time, we demonstrate that spiral arms, that form in a disc in a fully cosmological environment with realistic galaxy formation physics, drive large-scale systematic streaming motions. In particular, on the trailing edge of the spiral arms the peculiar galacto-centric radial and azimuthal velocity field is directed radially outward and azimuthally backward, whereas it is radially i…
Elliptical (E) and spiral (S) galaxies follow tight, but different, scaling laws that link their stellar masses, radii, and characteristic velocities. Mass and velocity, for example, scale tightly in spirals with little dependence on galaxy radius (the "Tully-Fisher relation"; TFR). On the other hand, ellipticals appear to trace a 2D surface in size-mass-velocity space (the "Fundamental Plane"; FP). Over the years, a number of studies have attempted to understand these empirical relations, usually in terms of variations of the virial theorem for E galaxies and in terms of the scaling relations…
The Galaxy Zoo 1 catalog displays a bias towards the S-wise winding direction in spiral galaxies which has yet to be explained. The lack of an explanation confounds our attempts to verify the Cosmological Principle, and has spurred some debate as to whether a bias exists in the real universe. The bias manifests not only in the obvious case of trying to decide if the universe as a whole has a winding bias, but also in the more insidious case of selecting which galaxies to include in a winding direction survey. While the former bias has been accounted for in a previous image-mirroring study, the…
We present the first analysis of the stellar content of the structures and substructures identified in the peculiar star-forming galaxy NGC5474, based on Hubble Space Telescope resolved photometry from the LEGUS survey. NGC5474 is a satellite of the giant spiral M101, and is known to have a prominent bulge that is significantly off-set from the kinematic center of the underlying HI and stellar disc. The youngest stars (age~ 100 Myr) trace a flocculent spiral pattern extending out to ~8 kpc from the center of the galaxy. On the other hand intermediate-age (age > 500 Myr) and old (age > 2 Gyr) s…
