English

An Iterative Method for Constructing Equilibrium Phase Models of Stellar Systems

Astrophysics 2009-11-13 v2

Abstract

We present a new method for constructing equilibrium phase models for stellar systems, which we call the iterative method. It relies on constrained, or guided evolution, so that the equilibrium solution has a number of desired parameters and/or constraints. This method is very powerful, to a large extent due to its simplicity. It can be used for mass distributions with an arbitrary geometry and a large variety of kinematical constraints. We present several examples illustrating it. Applications of this method include the creation of initial conditions for N-body simulations and the modelling of galaxies from their photometric and kinematic observations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0808.1980,
  title  = {An Iterative Method for Constructing Equilibrium Phase Models of Stellar Systems},
  author = {S. A. Rodionov and E. Athanassoula and N. Ya Sotnikova},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0808.1980},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

14 pages, 13 figures, Accepted for publication in MNRAS

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