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An N-body realization of the mass model of our Galaxy proposed by Bahcall, Schmidt & Soneira exhibits two-armed spiral instabilities, but shows no tendency towards bar formation. The central bulge component is primarily responsible for these unusual stability properties. The halo component of the model is shown to be irrelevant to bar stability but is still required in order to prevent one-armed instabilities.
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J. A. Sellwood (1985) studied this question.
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