The stability of uniformly rotating stellar disks

Abstract

We explore a series expansion method to calculate the modes of oscillations for a variety of uniformly rotating finite disks, either with or without a dark halo. Since all models have the same potential, this survey focuses on the role of the distribution function in stability analyses. We show that the stability behaviour is greatly influenced by the structure of the unperturbed distribution, particularly by its energy dependence. In addition we find that uniformly rotating disks with a halo in general can feature spiral-like instabilities.