Oral Presentation

Numerical Simulations of Disk Galaxies

Wing Kit Lee (ASIAA)

Abstract: Substructures of the spiral arm are commonly found in the nearby disk galaxies with grand-design spiral structure. However, their formation mechanism is not well-understood. Based on the theory of spiral density wave, Lee and Shu proposed a possible mechanism of generating these feather-like structure through the Feather Instability (FI) (Lee & Shu, ApJ 2012). Both self-gravity and magnetic field are found to be the important governing parameters (Lee 2014). In this talk, I will present some ongoing numerical work to understand the nonlinear regime of the instability by using numerical MHD simulations. By comparing numerical simulations with analytic calculations, we hope understand better the role of spiral arm on the interstellar turbulence and Giant Molecular Clouds formation.