Gas and dust structures in the vicinity of the arms of spiral galaxies

V. V. Korolev ; I. G. Kovalenko ; M. A. Bezborodov ; M. A. Eremin ; V. V. Savin

Matematičeskaâ fizika i kompʹûternoe modelirovanie, Tome 25 (2022) no. 1, pp. 49-68.

Résumé

A two-dimensional model of the flow of the gas-dust interstellar medium in the vicinity of the spiral arm of the galaxy is constructed. The flow in a vertical plane transverse to the disk plane is considered. The effects of nonadiabatic flow (volumetric heating and cooling of the gas by radiation) are taken into account. The balance of heating and cooling ensures the coexistence of two phases, cold parsec-sized clouds of atomic hydrogen and warm intercloud gas. The consideration includes polydisperse dust, represented by three fractions of particles of different sizes and masses. Dust particles have finite inertia, their movements do not exactly repeat the movement of gas. Turbulence in the disk and in the spiral arm is also taken into account. Models are considered that use different combinations of the location of turbulence sources in the disk and/or in the arm. The main results obtained by the methods of computer hydrodynamic modeling are as follows. 1) Clouds undergo significant transformations as they pass through the spiral arm. A significant part of the clouds is absorbed into a thin dense cloud layer, which extends in a spiral arm along the equatorial plane in the vicinity of the center of the arm and has a size of approximately half the width of the arm. A smaller part of the clouds passes without destruction or with partial destruction through the sleeve, experiencing strong deformations along the way. The small-scale cloud component is partially restored under the action of turbulence, which perturbs the extended cloud layer inside the arm and partially destroys it into separate fragments. 2) A wedge-shaped galactic shock wave is formed on the rear side of the arm with respect to the incoming gas flow, attached to the rear edge of the extended cloud layer. A flow limited by a shock wave has the character of a jet that performs quasi-periodic transverse oscillations. The reason for the oscillations, apparently, is the instability of the shear flow, since tangential discontinuities are formed inside the jet along the flow and at a small angle to the shock fronts. 3) Dust particles are dragged by turbulent eddies and carried to heights of 150-200 pc above the disk plane, which naturally explains the existence of chaotic filamentous dust structures extending above the galactic disk to heights of several hundred parsecs. 4) The grains of dust are distributed differently inside the vortices. Dust grains with sizes of 0.01-0.1 m cluster more easily than larger dust grains with a radius of 1 m. 5) Turbulence serves as a mechanism to effectively trap dust particles on the front side of the spiral arm. Modeling shows that dust lanes are more pronounced on the front side of the arm.

Détail

Mots-clés : spiral galaxies, turbulence
Keywords: gas-dust interstellar medium, supersonic flow, hydrodynamics of multiphase media, polydisperse dust, hydrodynamic modeling.