Global N-Body Simulation of Galactic Spiral Arms

The origin of galactic spiral arms is one of fundamental problems in astrophysics. Based on the local analysis Toomre (1981) proposed the swing amplification mechanism in which the self-gravity forms spiral arms as leading waves of stars rotate to trailing ones due to galactic shear. The structure of spiral arms is characterized by their number and pitch angle. We perform global $N$-body simulations of spiral galaxies to investigate the dependence of the spiral structure on disk parameters and compare the simulation results with the swing amplification model. We find that the spiral structure in the $N$-body simulations agrees well with that predicted by the swing amplification for the wide range of parameters. The pitch angle decreases with increasing the shear rate and is independent of the disk mass fraction. The number of spiral arms decreases with both increasing the shear rate and the disk mass fraction. If the disk mass fraction is fixed, the pitch angle increases with the number of spiral arms.
11 pages, 8 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRAS