How gravitational softening affects galaxy stability – I. Linear mode analysis of disc galaxies
| Autor: | W. Dehnen, Jean-Baptiste Fouvry, Sven De Rijcke |
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| Rok vydání: | 2019 |
| Předmět: |
DYNAMICS
Gravity (chemistry) FOS: Physical sciences NUMERICAL EXPERIMENTS Disc galaxy 01 natural sciences Stability (probability) Gravitation FLAT GALAXIES kinematics and dynamics [galaxies] 0103 physical sciences Newtonian fluid 010303 astronomy & astrophysics Softening evolution [galaxies] Physics 010308 nuclear & particles physics SPIRAL MODES Astronomy and Astrophysics Mechanics N-BODY SIMULATIONS Astrophysics - Astrophysics of Galaxies BAR Galaxy spiral [galaxies] Physics and Astronomy Space and Planetary Science Astrophysics of Galaxies (astro-ph.GA) Kernel (category theory) |
| Zdroj: | Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society MONTHLY NOTICES OF THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY |
| ISSN: | 0035-8711 |
| DOI: | 10.1093/mnras/stz309 |
| Popis: | Linear perturbation is used to investigate the effect of gravitational softening on the retrieved two-armed spiral eigenmodes of razor-thin stellar discs. We explore four softening kernels with different degrees of gravity bias, and with/without compact support (compact in the sense that they yield exactly Newtonian forces outside the softening kernel). These kernels are applied to two disc galaxy models with well-known unsoftened unstable modes. We illustrate quantitatively the importance of a vanishing linear gravity bias to yield accurate frequency estimates of the unstable modes. As such, Plummer softening, while very popular amongst simulators, performs poorly in our tests. The best results, with excellent agreement between the softened and unsoftened mode properties, are obtained with softening kernels that have a reduced gravity bias, obtained by compensating for the sub-Newtonian forces at small interparticle distances with slightly super-Newtonian forces at radii near the softening length. We present examples of such kernels that, moreover, are analytically simple and computationally cheap. Finally, these results light the way to the construction of softening methods with even smaller gravity bias, although at the price of increasingly complex kernels. 14 pages, 7 figures, submitted to MNRAS |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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