ON THE GALACTIC SPIRAL PATTERNS: STELLAR AND GASEOUS

Abstract

The gas response to a proposed spiral stellar pattern for our Galaxy is presented here as calculated via 2D hydrodynamic calculations utilizing the ZEUS code in the disk plane. The locus is that found by Drimmel (2000) from emission profiles in the K band and at 240 <TEX>${\mu}m$</TEX>. The self-consistency of the stellar spiral pattern was studied in previous work (see Martos et al. 2004). It is a sensitive function of the pattern rotation speed, <TEX>$\Omega$</TEX>p, among other parameters which include the mass in the spiral and its pitch angle. Here we further discuss the complex gaseous response found there for plausible values of <TEX>$\Omega$</TEX>p in our Galaxy, and argue that its value must be close to <TEX>$20 km s^{-l}\;kpc^{-1}$</TEX> from the strong self-consistency criterion and other recent, independent studies which depend on such parameter. However, other values of <TEX>$\Omega$</TEX>p that have been used in the literature are explored to study the gas response to the stellar (K band) 2-armed pattern. For our best fit values, the gaseous response to the 2-armed pattern displayed in the K band is a four-armed pattern with complex features in the interarm regions. This response resembles the optical arms observed in the Milky Way and other galaxies with the smooth underlying two-armed pattern of the old stellar disk populations in our interpretation. The complex gaseous response appears to be related to resonances in stellar orbits. Among them, the 4:1 resonance is paramount for the axisymmetric Galactic model employed, and the set of parameters explored. In the regime seemingly proper to our Galaxy, the spiral forcing appears to be marginally strong in the sense that the 4:1 resonance terminates the stellar pattern, despite its relatively low amplitude. In current work underway, the response for low values of <TEX>$\Omega$</TEX>p tends to remove most of the rich structure found for the optimal self-consistent model and the gaseous pattern is ring-like. For higher values than the optimal, more features and a multi-arm structure appears.