Shamvhavi Srivastava

My research with Dr. Kathryne Daniel is on radial migration in spiral galaxies focusing on the constraint pitch angle. I worked with tracer particle simulations to check how such wrapping co-rotating spirals with winding patterns differ from the solid-body or density wave spirals having consistent pattern speeds. This estimated RMS changes in azimuthal and radial angular momentum components for particles in the vicinity of the corotation radius and found that co-rotating spirals have higher values of RMS (azimuthal angular momentum) than the solid-body spirals, particularly at larger values of the pitch angle, while the RMS (radial angular momentum) remained largely unaffected. These findings on the dynamical aspects of spiral galaxies form part of a more general investigation into the variation in pitch angles which will be discussed in a subsequent publication.