Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Jan 2011
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2011aas...21720705e&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #217, #207.05; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 43, 2011
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
The shapes and strengths of arms in spiral galaxies provide insight into their formation. In optical bands, grand design galaxies show distinct differences in their arms compared with flocculent galaxies; they have long, symmetric, continuous arms with strong contrast over the interarm regions, while flocculent galaxies have short arm pieces and small contrasts. Such differences are evident in near-infrared images as well. Here we extend the study of arm structure to the mid-infrared with a sample of 50 galaxies from the Spitzer Survey of Stellar Structure in Galaxies (S4G) in order to examine the strengths and appearances of spiral arms at 3.6 and 4.5 microns; these bands trace the bulk of the underlying mass distribution without confusion from dust obscuration. We show symmetric components through image rotation, and measure arm-interarm contrasts for individual arms and Fourier components over the whole galaxy. We find that grand design galaxies have stronger arms than multiple arm or flocculent spirals even at mid-infrared wavelengths, suggesting that density waves are not significant in the latter. The peak Fourier components have higher values in barred galaxies with longer bars.
Elmegreen Debra Meloy
S4G Team
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