2006/07/31 by N. Voglis, Nikos Voglis, P. Tsoutsis +2 · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics #Barred spiral galaxy #Chaotic #Classical mechanics #Elliptical galaxy #Galaxy #Invariant (physics) #Lenticular galaxy #Mathematical analysis #Mathematical physics #Nonlinear Photonic Systems #Nonlinear Waves and Solitons #Periodic orbits #Phase space #Physics #Quantum chaos and dynamical systems #Quantum mechanics #Spiral (railway) #Spiral galaxy #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2966.2006.11021.x
published as Mon.Not.Roy.Astron.Soc.373:280-294,2006 · 18 pages, 10 figures, to be published in MNRAS
openalex publication_date 2006/10/20 · arxiv created 2006/11/07 · arxiv updated 2016/04/26 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
In the presence of a strong m= 2 component in a rotating galaxy, the phase-space structure near corotation is shaped to a large extent by the invariant manifolds of the short-period family of unstable periodic orbits terminating at L1 or L2. The main effect of these manifolds is to create robust phase correlations among a number of chaotic orbits large enough to support a spiral density wave outside corotation. The phenomenon is described theoretically by soliton-like solutions of a Sine–Gordon equation. Numerical examples are given in an N-body simulation of a barred spiral galaxy. In these examples, we demonstrate how the projection of unstable manifolds in configuration space reproduces essentially the entire observed bar–spiral pattern.