Related papers: The rate of secular evolution in elliptical galaxi…
Internal rotation has emerged as a fundamental feature of globular clusters (GCs), yet its origin and long-term evolution remain poorly understood. We explore the evolution of rotating GCs over a Hubble time under the combined influence of…
Nuclear stellar clusters are common in the center of galaxies. We consider the possibility that their progenitors assumed to be globular clusters may have formed elsewhere, migrated to and assembled near their present location. The main…
We derive the conservative secular evolution of precessing compact binaries to second post-Newtonian order accuracy, with leading-order spin-orbit, spin-spin and mass quadrupole-monopole contributions included. The emerging closed system of…
We investigate the interaction between an eccentric planet and a less massive external debris disc. This scenario could occur after planet-planet scattering or merging events. We characterise the evolution over a wide range of initial…
We present a new simple functional form to model the evolution of a spherical mass distribution in a cosmological context. Two parameters control the growth of the system and this is modelled using a redshift dependent exponential for the…
We present the results of a series of gas dynamical cosmological simulations of the formation of individual massive field galaxies in the standard concordance \LCDM and in a \LWDM cosmology. The galaxies form in an initial burst of star…
Evolution and disruption of galaxies orbiting in the gravitational field of a larger cluster galaxy are driven by three coupled mechanisms: 1) the heating due to its time dependent motion in the primary; 2) mass loss due to the tidal strain…
We identify a new secular instability of eccentric stellar disks around supermassive black holes. We show that retrograde precession of the stellar orbits, due to the presence of a stellar cusp, induces coherent torques that amplify…
Planetary, stellar and galactic physics often rely on the general restricted gravitational N-body problem to model the motion of a small-mass object under the influence of much more massive objects. Here, I formulate the general restricted…
We review internal secular evolution in galaxy disks -- the fundamental process by which isolated disks evolve. We concentrate on the buildup of dense central features that look like classical, merger-built bulges but that were made slowly…
We investigate the secular dynamics of three-body circumbinary systems under the effect of tides. We use the octupolar non-restricted approximation for the orbital interactions, general relativity corrections, the quadrupolar approximation…
Bulges are of different types, morphologies and kinematics, from pseudo-bulges, close to disk properties (Sersic index, rotation fraction, flatenning), to classical de Vaucouleurs bulges, close to elliptical galaxies. Secular evolution and…
Here I review recent work, by other authors and by myself, on some particular topics related to the regular and chaotic motion in elliptical galaxies. I show that it is quite possible to build highly stable triaxial stellar systems that…
We take advantage of the largest high-resolution simulation of cosmic structure growth ever carried out -- the Millennium Simulation of the concordance LambdaCDM cosmogony -- to study how the star formation histories, ages and metallicities…
We use both N-body simulations and integration in fixed potentials to explore the stability and the long-term secular evolution of self-consistent, equilibrium, non-rotating, triaxial spheroidal galactic models. More specifically, we…
Observations have evidenced that passively evolving massive galaxies at high redshift are much more compact than local galaxies with the same stellar mass. We argue that the observed strong evolution in size is directly related to the…
We present a method for simulating numerically the effect of the adiabatic growth of black holes on the structure of elliptical galaxies. Using a parallel self--consistent field code, we add black holes to N--body realizations of model…
Recent observations have shown that at least some close-in exoplanets maintain eccentric orbits despite tidal circularization timescales that are typically shorter than stellar ages. We explore gravitational interactions with a distant…
This paper discusses three new issues that necessarily arise in realistic attempts to apply nonlinear dynamics to galaxy evolution, namely: (i) the meaning of chaos in many-body systems, (ii) the time-dependence of the bulk potential, which…
We investigate the evolution of two bars formed in fully self-consistent hydrodynamic simulations of the formation of Milky Way-mass galaxies. One galaxy shows higher central mass concentration and has a longer and stronger bar than the…