| Issue |
A&A
Volume 680, December 2023
|
|
|---|---|---|
| Article Number | L14 | |
| Number of page(s) | 4 | |
| Section | Letters to the Editor | |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202348449 | |
| Published online | 15 December 2023 | |
Letter to the Editor
The possible evolution of pitch angles of spiral galaxies
1
St. Petersburg State University, Universitetskii pr. 28, St. Petersburg 198504, Russia
e-mail: v.reshetnikov@spbu.ru
2
Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory, Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg 196140, Russia
3
Department of Physics and Astronomy, N283 ESC, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT 84602, USA
Received:
31
October
2023
Accepted:
21
November
2023
Aims. The origin and maintenance of spiral structure in galaxies, the correlation between different types of spiral structure and several proposed mechanisms for their generation, and the evolution of spiral arms of galaxies with time are questions that are still controversial. In this note we study the spiral structure in a sample of distant galaxies in order to infer the evolution of spiral arm characteristics with redshift.
Methods. We considered a sample of 171 face-on spiral galaxies in the Hubble Space Telescope COSMOS (The Cosmic Evolution Survey) field. The galaxies are distributed up to z ≈ 1 with a mean value of 0.44. For all galaxies, we determined the pitch angles of the spiral arms and analysed their dependence on redshift; a total of 359 arms were measured.
Results. Analyses of our measurements combined with the literature data suggest a possible evolution of the pitch angles of spiral galaxies: by the modern epoch the spiral pattern, on average, becomes more tightly wound. This may be a consequence of the general evolution of the structure of galaxies as galaxies become more massive over time and their bulges grow. In addition, the distribution of the cotangent of pitch angle of galaxies indicates the possibility that the dominant mechanism of spiral pattern generation changes over time.
Key words: galaxies: evolution / galaxies: spiral / galaxies: structure
© The Authors 2023
Open Access article, published by EDP Sciences, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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