Related papers: Regular and chaotic motion in elliptical galaxies
The orbits of stars in galaxies are generically chaotic: the chaotic behavior arises in part from the intrinsically grainy nature of a potential that is composed of point masses. Even if the potential is assumed to be smooth, however,…
We investigate the regular or chaotic nature of orbits of stars moving in the meridional plane $(R,z)$ of an axially symmetric galactic model with a flat disk and a central, non spherical and massive nucleus. In particular, we study the…
Recent work on the construction of spherical, Axisymmetric and triaxial dynamical models for elliptical galaxies is reviewed briefly, including their role in providing evidence for dark halos and central black holes. The different orbital…
A 3D dynamical model with a quasi-homogeneous core and a disk component is used for the chaos control in the central parts of elliptical galaxy. Numerical experiments in the 2D system show a very complicated phase plane with a large chaotic…
We use a simple dynamical model in order to investigate the regular or chaotic character of orbits in a barred galaxy with a central, spherically symmetric, dense nucleus and a flat disk. In particular, we explore how the total orbital…
Dissipationless N-body models of rotating galaxies, iso-energetic to a non-rotating model, are examined as regards the mass in regular and in chaotic motion. The values of their spin parameters $\lambda$ are near the value $\lambda=0.22$ of…
We investigate the regular or chaotic nature of star orbits moving in the meridional plane of an axially symmetric galactic model with a disk and a spherical nucleus. We study the influence of some important parameters of the dynamical…
We investigate the properties of motion in a map model derived from a galactic Hamiltonian made up of perturbed elliptic oscillators. The phase space portrait is obtained in all three different cases using the map and numerical integration…
The rotation of asymmetric bodies in eccentric Keplerian orbits can be chaotic when there is some overlap of spin-orbit resonances. Here we show that the rotation of two coorbital bodies (two planets orbiting a star or two satellites of a…
Cuspy triaxial potentials admit a large number of chaotic orbits, which moreover exhibit extreme "stickiness" that makes the process of chaotic mixing surprisingly inefficient. Environmental effects, modeled as noise and/or periodic…
We study the behavior of orbits in two different galactic dynamical models, describing the motion in the central parts of a triaxial elliptical galaxy with a dense nucleus. Numerical experiments show that both models display regular motion…
Phase mixing of chaotic orbits exponentially distributes these orbits through their accessible phase space. This phenomenon, commonly called ``chaotic mixing'', stands in marked contrast to phase mixing of regular orbits which proceeds as a…
We study the role of asymptotic curves in supporting the spiral structure of a N-body model simulating a barred spiral galaxy. Chaotic orbits with initial conditions on the unstable asymptotic curves of the main unstable periodic orbits…
The radial-orbit instability is a collective phenomenon that has heretofore only been observed in spherical systems. We find that this instability occurs also in triaxial systems, as we checked by performing extensive N-body simulations…
We construct stable axially symmetric models of elliptical galaxies. The particle density on phase space for these models depends monotonically on the particle energy and on the third component of the angular momentum. They are obtained as…
The pattern speeds of spiral galaxies are closely related to the flow of material in their disks. Flows that follow the `precessing ellipses' paradigm (see e.g., Kalnajs 1973) are likely associated with slowly rotating spirals, which have…
Luminous galaxies and their dark halos are likely to have triaxial shapes. The construction of distribution functions for triaxial systems is a hard problem, due to the existence of only one exact integral of motion, the energy $E$. Even…
We investigate regular and chaotic two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) orbits of stars in models of a galactic potential consisting in a disk, a halo and a bar, to find the origin of boxy components, which are part of the bar or…
Self-consistent solutions for triaxial mass models are highly non-unique. In general, some of these solutions might be dynamically unstable, making them inappropriate as descriptions of steady-state galaxies. Here we demonstrate for the…
We use Laskar's frequency mapping technique to study the dynamics of triaxial galaxies with central density cusps and nuclear black holes. For ensembles of 10^4 orbits, we numerically compute the three fundamental frequencies of the motion,…