Investigation of the parameters of spiral pattern in galaxies: the arm width

Abstract: In this work we determine the parameters of spiral structure for a sample of face-on spiral galaxies. In practice, the solution of this problem is a hard task because of the diversity of the observed characteristics of spiral structure, such as the arm number, their shape, arm contrast etc. In this work we study spiral structure in galaxies based on an analysis of photometric cuts perpendicular to the arm direction. The method is based on an approximation of these slices with an analytical function and derivation of the parameters of spiral structure (arm width, asymmetry, pitch angle) using the fitted parameters of this approximation. The algorithm has been applied to a sample of 155 galaxies selected from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey in different passbands. In this paper we only consider the results on the arm width: most spirals show an increase of their width with galactocentric distance. Only 14 per cent of galaxies in our sample show an opposite trend or have an almost constant arm width at all radii.