English

Stability of rotating spherical stellar systems

Astrophysics 2009-10-31 v1

Abstract

We study the stability of rotating collisionless self-gravitating spherical systems by using high resolution N-body experiments on a Connection Machine CM-5. We added rotation to Ossipkov-Merritt (hereafter OM) anisotropic spherical systems by using two methods. The first method conserves the anisotropy of the distribution function defined in the OM algorithm. The second method distorts the systems in velocity space. We then show that the stability of systems depends both on their anisotropy and on the value of the ratio between the total kinetic energy and the rotational kinetic energy. We also test the relevance of the stability parameters introduced by Perez et al. (1996) for the case of rotating systems.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.astro-ph/9903087,
  title  = {Stability of rotating spherical stellar systems},
  author = {J. -M. Alimi and J. Perez and A. Serna},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/9903087},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

15 Pages, 5 Figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS

R2 v1 2026-07-22T09:46:44.583Z