Related papers: Analytical galactic models with mild stellar cusps
Spherical systems with polytropic equations of state are of great interest in astrophysics. They are widely used to describe neutron stars, red giants, white dwarfs, brown dwarfs, main sequence stars, galactic halos, and globular clusters…
Using the standard dynamical theory of spherical systems, we calculate the properties of spherical galaxies and clusters whose density profiles obey the universal form first obtained in high resolution cosmological N-body simulations by…
Rotation curves of galaxies probe their total mass distributions, including dark matter. Dwarf galaxies are excellent systems to investigate the dark matter density distribution, as they tend to have larger fractions of dark matter compared…
We study density cusps in the center of clusters of galaxies to reconcile X-ray mass estimates with gravitational lensing masses. For various mass density models with cusps we compute X-ray surface brightness distribution, and fit them to…
Measurements of the surface brightness distribution and of the velocity dispersion profile have been so far used to infer the inner dynamics of globular clusters. We show that those observations do not trace back the dark matter potentially…
We study the origin and properties of 'extra' or 'excess' central light in the surface brightness profiles of cusp or power-law ellipticals. Dissipational mergers give rise to two-component profiles: an outer profile established by violent…
We describe a one-parameter family of models of stable spherical stellar systems in which the phase-space distribution function depends only on energy. The models have similar density profiles in their outer parts ($\rho\propto r^{-4}$) and…
The Nuker profile, characterised by an inner and outer power-law profile smoothly merged around a break radius, is a very popular model to describe the surface brightness profile of galactic nuclei. A disadvantage of this model for…
A method is presented for finding anisotropic distribution functions for stellar systems with known, spherically symmetric, densities, which depends only on the two classical integrals of the energy and the magnitude of the angular…
We discuss the problem of using stellar kinematics of early-type galaxies to constrain the galaxies' orbital anisotropies and radial mass profiles. We demonstrate that compressing a galaxy's light distribution along the line of sight…
We present a new family of spherically symmetric models for the luminous components of elliptical and spiral galaxies and their dark matter haloes. Our starting point is a general expression for the logarithmic slope $\alpha(r) =…
We present high resolution R-band images of the central regions of 67 early-type galaxies obtained with the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) aboard the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). Our sample strikingly confirms the complex…
We report on the structure of the nuclear star cluster in the innermost 0.16 pc of the Galaxy as measured by the number density profile of late-type giants. Using laser guide star adaptive optics in conjunction with the integral field…
We introduce a new class of 2-D mass models, whose potentials are of St\"ackel form in elliptic coordinates. Our model galaxies have two separate strong cusps that form double nuclei. The potential and surface density distributions are…
Both numerical simulations and observational evidence indicate that the outer regions of galaxies and dark matter haloes are typically mildly to significantly radially anisotropic. The inner regions can be significantly non-isotropic,…
Hubble Space Telescope revealed a dicothomy in the central surface brightness profiles of early-type galaxies, that subsequently have been grouped into two families: core, boxy, anisotropic systems and cuspy ("power law"), disky, rotating…
Recent observations of galaxy luminosity profiles and dark matter simulations find luminosity and mass distributions characterized by central cusps rather than finite core radii. We introduce and implement a set of cusped ellipsoidal lens…
In the context of the study of the properties of the mutual mass distribution of the bright and dark matter in elliptical galaxies, present a family of two-component, spherical, self-consistent galaxy models, where one density distribution…
We combine the results from several HST investigations of the central structure of early-type galaxies to generate a large sample of parameterized surface photometry. The studies included were those that used the "Nuker law" to characterize…
We apply four different mass modelling methods to a suite of publicly available mock data for spherical stellar systems. We focus on the recovery of the density and velocity anisotropy as a function of radius, using either line-of-sight…