M=1 and 2 Gravitational Instabilities in Gaseous Disks: I. Diffuse Gas

Abstract

We report the results of self-gravitating simulations of spiral galaxies, modeled by stellar and gaseous components, developed to investigate in particular the role of dissipation in the evolution of galaxy disks. The gas disk is simulated by the Beam-Scheme method, where it is considered as a self-gravitating fluid. The results suggest that the gravitational coupling between the stars and gas plays a fundamental role in the formation and dissolution of stellar bars, depending on the gaseous mass concentration and on the degree of dissipation. In addition we remark that initially concentrated gas disks can be unstable to the one-armed (m=1) spiral perturbations, which may explain the lopsided features observed in the gas distribution of the late-type isolated galaxies. The development of the m=1 feature slows down the radial gas flows towards the center, since the large-scale gravity torques are then much weaker.