The Carnegie-Irvine Galaxy Survey. VI. Spirals

To probe the physical nature and possible cosmological evolution of spiral arms, a common feature of many disk galaxies, it is important to quantify their main characteristics. We describe robust methods to measure the number of arms and their mean strength, length, and pitch angle.

The arm strength depends only weakly on the adopted radii over which it is measured, and it is stronger in bluer bands than redder bands. The vast majority of clearly two-armed ("grand-design") spiral galaxies have a systematically higher relative amplitude of the m=2 Fourier mode in the main spiral region. We use both one-dimensional and two-dimensional Fourier decomposition to measure the pitch angle, finding reasonable agreement between these two techniques with a scatter of ~2{deg}.