Spiral Structure in Galaxies

How does it happen that billions of stars can cooperate to produce the beautiful spirals that characterize so many galaxies, including ours? This book reviews the history behind the discovery of spiral galaxies and the problems faced when trying to explain the existence of spiral structure within them. In the book, subjects such as galaxy morphology and structure are addressed as well as several models for spiral structure. The evidence in favor or against these models is discussed. The book ends by discussing how spiral structure can be used as a proxy for other properties of spiral galaxies, such as their dark matter content and their central supermassive black hole masses, and why this is important.

Marc Seigar is a Professor of Astrophysics and Associate Dean of the Swenson College of Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD). He is also the current director of the Marshall W. Alworth Planetarium at UMD. Prior to his arrival at UMD, he worked as a Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, a Project Scientist at the University of California, Irvine, and a Staff Astronomer at the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope. Professor Seigar has published numerous papers and conference proceedings articles in the field of galaxy dynamics, spiral structure, and dark matter. He is the author of Dark Matter in the Universe, IOP Concise Physics, a Morgan & Claypool publication, 2015.