Spiral patterns beyond the optical radius: numerical simulations and synthetic HI observations

International audienceThe outer parts of many galaxy disks exhibit extended spiral arms far beyond the optical radius. To understand the nature and the origin of such outer spiral structure, we investigate the propagation in the outer gaseous regions of large-scale spiral density waves excited in the bright optical disk. By means of 3D hydrodynamical simulations, we show that spiral density waves, penetrating in the gas through the outer Lindblad resonance, can indeed give rise to relatively regular patterns outside the bright optical stellar disk. The amplitude of spiral structure increases rapidly with radius. Beyond the optical radius, spirals become nonlinear and develop small-scale features related to shear-induced instabilities. We also construct the synthetic 21-cm data cubes extracted from simulated gaseous disks. Our synthetic HI observations point to the existence of specific kinematical features related to the presence of spiral pattern perturbations that should be found in deep HI observations