On the gravitational stability of a galactic disc as a two-fluid system

Mohsen Shadmehri, Fazeleh Khajenabi

Published 2011-12-12Version 1

Gravitational stability of a disc consisting of the gaseous and the stellar components are studied in the linear regime when the gaseous component is turbulent. A phenomenological approach is adopted to describe the turbulence, in which not only the effective surface density but the velocity dispersion of the gaseous component are both scale-dependent as power-law functions of the wavenumber of the perturbations. Also, the stellar component which has gravitational interaction with the gas is considered as a fluid. We calculate growth rate of the perturbations and in the most of the studied cases, the stability of the disc highly depends on the existence of the stars and the exponents of the functions for describing the turbulence. Our analysis suggests that the conventional gas and star threshold is not adequate for analyzing stability of the two-component discs when turbulence is considered.