Related papers: Problems of Collisional Stellar Dynamics
The formation of large-scale vortices is an intriguing phenomenon in two-dimensional turbulence. Such organization is observed in large-scale oceanic or atmospheric flows, and can be reproduced in laboratory experiments and numerical…
In interacting galaxies, strong tidal forces disturb the global morphology of the progenitors and give birth to the long stellar, gaseous and dusty tails often observed. In addition to this destructive effect, tidal forces can morph into a…
In this review, I discuss just three aspects of the stability and evolution of galactic discs. (1) I first review our understanding of the bar instability and how it can be controlled. Disc galaxies in which the orbital speed does not…
We study binary stars moving through a uniform dark matter background and experiencing dynamical friction. The centre-of-mass motion of the pairs is taken into account. We derive formulas and timescales for the secular evolution of the…
We introduce a numerical method to integrate tidal effects on collisional systems, using any definition of the external potential as a function of space and time. Rather than using a linearisation of the tidal field, this new method follows…
The LCDM model is the most commonly admitted to describe our Universe. In spite of a great success with regard to the large scale structure formation, some problems are still unresolved at galactic scales. Alternative scenarios have to be…
Most physical systems are modelled by an ordinary or a partial differential equation, like the n-body problem in celestial mechanics. In some cases, for example when studying the long term behaviour of the solar system or for complex…
In young star clusters, the density can be high enough and the velocity dispersion low enough for stars to collide and merge with a significant probability. This has been suggested as a possible way to build up the high-mass portion of the…
Using the equations of motion from Hill's problem, with added accelerations for different forms of dynamical friction, we provide the (to-date) broadest scale-free study of friction-driven binary formation in gaseous disks and stellar…
Stellar shells observed in many giant elliptical and lenticular as well as a few spiral and dwarf galaxies presumably result from radial minor mergers of galaxies. We show that the line-of-sight velocity distribution of the shells has a…
This paper presents a selective historical perspective of fission research over the last thirty-five years while Ray Nix has made central contributions to the field. The emphasis is placed on early studies of the shell stabilized secondary…
Gravitational lensing and stellar dynamics are two independent methods, based solely on gravity, to study the mass distributions of galaxies. Both methods suffer from degeneracies, however, that are difficult to break. In this paper, we…
In the presence of wave dissipation, phase-space structures emerge in nonlinear Vlasov dynamics. Their dynamics can lead to a nonlinear continuous shifting of the wave frequency (chirping). This report summarizes my personal contribution to…
Strong gravitational lensing and stellar dynamics provide two complementary and orthogonal constraints on the density profiles of galaxies. Based on spherically symmetric, scale-free, mass models, it is shown that the combination of both…
The process of momentum and energy transfer between a massive body and a background medium it is moving through is known as dynamical friction (DF). It is key to our understanding of many astrophysical systems. We present a series of…
We study the evaporation of stars from globular clusters using the simplified Chandrasekhar model. This is an analytically tractable model giving reasonable agreement with more sophisticated models that require complicated numerical…
We present the dynamical analysis for interacting quintessence, considering linear cosmological perturbations. Matter perturbations improve the background analysis and viable critical points describing the transition of the three…
The dynamics of planetesimals plays an important role in planet formation, because their velocity distribution sets the growth rate to larger bodies. When planetesimals form in protoplanetary discs, their orbits are nearly circular and…
The time irreversibility and fast relaxation of collapsing $N$-body gravitating systems (as opposed to the time reversibility of the equations of motion for individual stars or particles) are traditionally attributed to information loss due…
The dynamics of fission has been studied by solving Euler-Lagrange equation with dissipation generated through one and two body nuclear friction. The average kinetic energies of the fission fragments, prescission neutron multiplicities and…