Related papers: Triaxiality Inhibitors in N-Body Simulations
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…
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…
By means of numerical simulations we study the radial-orbit instability in anisotropic self-gravitating $N-$body systems under the effect of noise. We find that the presence of additive or multiplicative noise has a different effect on the…
The gravitational three-body problem is a fundamental problem in physics and has significant applications to astronomy. Three-body configurations are often considered stable as long the system is hierarchical; that is, the two orbital…
This paper constructs an analytic form for a triaxial potential that describes the dynamics of a wide variety of astrophysical systems, including the inner portions of dark matter halos, the central regions of galactic bulges, and young…
To gain understanding of the complicated, non-linear and numerical processes associated with the tidal evolution of dark matter subhaloes in numerical simulation, we perform a large suite of idealized simulations that follow individual…
N-body simulations of disc galaxies that display recurrent transient spiral patterns are comparatively easy to construct, but are harder to understand. In this paper, I summarise the evidence from such experiments that the spiral patterns…
An earlier paper presented the potentially significant discovery that disturbances in simplified simulations of a stellar disc model that was predicted to be stable in linear theory grew to large amplitude over a long period of time. The…
In recent years, the long-term effects of non-linear perturbations were found to be important for the evolution of the hierarchical triple system, which, for the central third body of a larger mass, can significantly suppress the…
We here describe the possibility of a synthetic description of the onset of Chaos in many degrees of freedom dynamical systems within the framework of the geometric description of dynamics. We show how this approach to instability helps to…
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…
Much of standard galaxy dynamics rests on the implicit assumption that the corresponding N-body problem is (near) integrable. This notion although leading to great simplification is by no means a fact. It is therefore important to develop…
Cosmological N-body simulations indicate that the dark matter haloes of galaxies should be generally triaxial. Yet, the presence of a baryonic disc is believed to alter the shape of the haloes. Here we aim to study how bar formation is…
Recent work on the dynamics of triaxial stellar systems is reviewed. The motion of boxlike orbits in realistic triaxial potentials is generically stochastic. The degree to which the stochasticity manifests itself in the dynamics depends on…
Errors in numerical simulations of gravitating systems can be magnified exponentially over short periods of time. Numerical shadowing provides a way of demonstrating that the dynamics represented by numerical simulations are representative…
Simulations of purely self-gravitating N-body systems are often used in astrophysics and cosmology to study the collisionless limit of such systems. Their results for macroscopic quantities should then converge well for sufficiently large…
A long-standing controversy in studies of spiral structure has concerned the lifetimes of individual spiral patterns. Much theoretical work has sought quasi-stationary spiral modes while N-body simulations have consistently displayed…
The origin of spiral patterns in galaxies is still not fully understood. Similar features also develop readily in N-body simulations of isolated cool, collisionless disks, yet even here the mechanism has yet to be explained. In this series…
We study the phase-space behaviour of nearby trajectories in integrable potentials. We show that the separation of nearby orbits initially diverges very fast, mimicking a nearly exponential behaviour, while at late times it grows linearly.…
Self-consistent N-body simulations are efficient tools to study galactic dynamics. However, using them to study individual trajectories (or ensembles) in detail can be challenging. Such orbital studies are important to shed light on global…