演講資訊

摘要：

Optical images of nearby grand-design spiral galaxies reveal details of the spiral substructure near the spiral arms. In particular, the dust lanes that jutting out perpendicular to the spiral arms (i.e., feathers) are found to coincide with dense molecular gas and are thought to be related to star formation along the arm. We proposed a formation mechanism of the feathers due to the instability of the spiral shock (Lee & Shu 2012). Such feathering instability is parasitic to the spiral structure and is basically a gravitational instability due to gas self-gravity. I will review some recent work on understanding the instability by using a parameter study (Lee 2014).