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Regular Chains of Star Formation Regions in Spiral Arms and Rings of Disk Galaxies

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Abstract

The regularity in the distribution of young stellar groups along the spiral arms of galaxies, first discovered by Bruce and Debra Elmegreen in 1983, was considered a rather rare phenomenon. However, recent studies of the spatial regularities in the distribution of the young stellar populations along the arms of the spiral galaxies NGC 628, NGC 895, NGC 4321, NGC 5474, NGC 6946, as well as along the rings of the spiral galaxy NGC 6217 and the lenticular galaxy NGC 4324, have revealed that this spatial (quasi) regularity and/or the presence of regular chains of star-forming regions is a fairly common phenomenon. Across all galaxies, the characteristic regularity scale is 350–500 pc or a multiple thereof. It should be noted that theoretical models predict an instability scale of a stellar-gas disk on the order of a few kpc, which is several times larger than what has been observed. The paper is partly based on the report presented at the Modern Stellar Astronomy 2022 Conference held at the Caucasian Mountain Observatory of the Sternberg Astronomical Institute, Moscow State University, on November 8–10, 2022.

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Notes

  1. The image of NGC 4321 in the figure obtained in [26] was taken from the NED database; NGC 4324, from the SDSS survey database (http://www.sdss.org/dr13/) [27]; images of other galaxies are taken from the observations according to the author’s programs.

  2. http://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/

  3. http://leda.univ-lyon1.fr/

  4. http://www.mpia.de/THINGS

  5. Figure courtesy of A.A. Marchuk (St. Petersburg State University). It is similar but not identical to Fig. 4 from [11].

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewer for the valuable comments. I express my gratitude to the organizers of the conference Modern Stellar Astronomy 2022. I thank E.V. Shimanovskaya (SAI MSU), A.V. Zasov (SAI MSU), O.V. Egorov (SAI MSU, Heidelberg University), A.A. Marchuk (St. Petersburg State University), and N.A. Zaitseva (SAI MSU) for help and advice, as well as A.V. Moiseev (SAO RAS) for the fruitful discussion. Special thanks to A.A. Marchuk for the original λ distribution map. This study used open data from the THINGS, BIMA SONG, SDSS projects and the NED and LEDA databases.

Funding

This study was supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (RFBR), grant no. 20-02-00080. The study was supported by the Interdisciplinary Scientific and Educational School of Moscow State University “Fundamental and Applied Space Research.”

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    A. S. Gusev

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Translated by M. Chubarova

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Gusev, A.S. Regular Chains of Star Formation Regions in Spiral Arms and Rings of Disk Galaxies. Astron. Rep. 67, 458–469 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1134/S1063772923050049

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