Lecture 21: Stability, disk dynamics and spiral structure

Reading:

Binney and Tremaine, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3.1, 6.1-6.3

Optional reading:

Binney and Tremaine, 5.3 - analytic results for stability of rotating stellar systems
Binney and Tremaine, 6.4 - on spiral structure theories
Binney and Tremaine, Appendix 1.E - review of fluid mechanics
Landau, L., and Lifshitz, E. M. 1959, Fluid mechanics (Oxford: Pergamon) - the first 15 pages contain most of what you
need to know about fluid mechanics

Texts on spiral structure:

Rohlfs, K. 1977, Lectures on density wave theory (Springer: Berlin) - good basic background, but somewhat out of date

Bertin, G., and Lin, C. C. 1996, Spiral structure in galaxies: a density wave theory (MIT: Cambridge) - up-to-date, but strongly reflecting the views of the authors and somewhat over-enthusiastic in interpreting the data

Palmer, P. 1994, Stability of collisionless stellar systems (Kluwer: Dordrecht) - mostly on spherical systems but there is one chapter on disks. The discussion is pretty formal, but it's a good reference.

Papers:

Toomre, A. 1978, ARAA 15, 437 - an old but very influential review of spiral structure theories; difficult
to read but worth the effort

Toomre, A. 1964, ApJ 139, 1217 - the original derivation of Toomre's Q parameter for axisymmetric stability

Hohl, F. 1971, ApJ 168, 343 - the original numerical experiments demonstrating the bar instability

Lin, C. C., and Shu, F. H. 1964, ApJ 140, 646 - the original paper that introduced density-wave theory

Ostriker, J. P., & Peebles, P.J.E. 1973, ApJ 186, 467 - the proposal that a massive dark halo was needed to suppress the bar instability in disk galaxies

Toomre, A. 1981, in The structure and evolution of normal galaxies, ed. S. M. Fall and D. Lynden-Bell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 111 - swing amplification

Sellwood, J. A. 1999, in Galaxy dynamics, ed. D. Merritt, J. A. Sellwood, and M. Valluri (San Francisco: ASP), 351 - a review of the maximum disk problem (also astro-ph/9903184)

Rafikov, R. 2001, MNRAS 323, 445 - Toomre's Q in the solar neighborhood