arXiv subjects

Amy Smock

Publications and source records attributed to Amy Smock.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Spiral Morphology and Radial Migration: Kinematically heating, cooling, and cold

Transient spiral arms are known to drive radial redistribution of stars and thus could play a central role in shaping disk galaxies, including modifying, over time, the age, chemical, and kinematic (chrono-chemo-dynamic) distributions in the Milky Way. However, the physical factors governing the efficiency of such processes remain poorly understood. This paper investigates how the morphology of spiral arms -- the number, pitch angle, lifetime, and radial dependence of the pattern speed -- influences orbital redistribution through 'cold torquing' at the corotation resonance(s). Analytic expressions are derived for the maximum radial excursion of stars trapped at corotation that explicitly account for spiral morphology, predicting that the efficiency of cold torquing for a density-wave like spiral is greater for more open spiral patterns. Tracer-particle simulations confirm the analytic prediction, in both two- and three-dimensional galactic potentials. In contrast, spirals that have a radially dependent pattern speed such that they corotate with the disk at all radii exhibit the opposite behavior, with cold torquing becoming more efficient as the spiral winds to smaller pitch angles over time. This study further finds that resonant interactions from the same transient spiral causing cold torquing naturally also produces both kinematic heating and cooling of orbits away from corotation. These results demonstrate that spiral morphology alone cannot predict the efficiency of cold torquing and suggest that the relationship between spiral pitch angle and radial redistribution provides a potential diagnostic for distinguishing between competing theories of spiral structure.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2026

Wrinkles in Time. II. Stellar Age Trends in Kinematic Signatures from Transient Spiral Structure

Spiral arms in the disks of galaxies like the Milky Way can generate kinematic signatures, which appear as ridges or wrinkles in action space. Such signatures have proven difficult to disentangle using kinematic measures alone. In this study, we investigate how including stellar age as an additional dimension for analysis may provide a novel insight into the physical characteristics, timescales, and nature of the progenitors of such perturbations, where these novel insights could contribute to our understanding of the history of spiral arms in the Milky Way. We used a suite of tracer particle simulations that modeled a variety of prescriptions for spiral arms to characterize observable trends. The Lindblad resonances of nonwinding spirals produce signature overdensities, or wrinkles, in a kinematic space that is typically associated with older stellar populations (high radial action). We find that these wrinkles are preferentially populated with stars that were initially in nearly circular orbits, kinematics that is generally correlated with younger stellar ages. It follows that the stellar age distribution of wrinkle populations could serve to place constraints on the past passage of a transient spiral pattern in the solar neighborhood. For example, our simulations suggest that a physically motivated spiral pattern could significantly populate a wrinkle with zero-age stars in orbits typically occupied by stars much older than the Sun.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2023

Wrinkles in Time -- I: Rapid Rotators Found in High Eccentricity Orbits

Recent space-based missions have ushered in a new era of observational astronomy, where high-cadence photometric light curves for thousands to millions of stars in the solar neighborhood can be used to test and apply stellar age-dating methods, including gyrochronology. Combined with precise kinematics, these data allow for powerful new insights into our understanding of the Milky Way's dynamical history. Using TESS data, we build a series of rotation period measurement and confirmation pipelines and test them on 1,560 stars across five benchmark samples: the Pleiades, Pisces--Eridanus, Praesepe, the Hyades, and field stars from the MEarth Project. Our pipelines' recovery rates across these groups are on average 89\%. We then apply these pipelines to 4,085 likely single stars with TESS light curves in two interesting regions of Galactic action space. We identify 141 unique, rapidly rotating stars in highly eccentric orbits in the disk, some of which appear as rotationally young as the 120-Myr-old Pleiades. Pending spectroscopic analysis to confirm their youth, this indicates these stars were subject to fast-acting dynamical phenomena, the origin of which will be investigated in later papers in this series.

astro-ph.SR↗