Related papers: Simulation of the loss-cone instability in spheric…
A new so-called `gravitational loss-cone instability' in stellar systems has recently been investigated theoretically in the framework of linear perturbation theory and proved to be potentially important in understanding the physical…
We study spherical and disk clusters in a near-Keplerian potential of galactic centers or massive black holes. In such a potential orbit precession is commonly retrograde, i.e. direction of the orbit precession is opposite to the orbital…
We examine the stability of a low-mass stellar system surrounding a massive central object. Examples of such systems include the centers of galaxies or star clusters containing a massive black hole, and the Oort comet cloud. If the…
We discovered an oscillatory instability in a system of inelastically colliding hard spheres, driven by two opposite "thermal" walls at zero gravity. The instability, predicted by a linear stability analysis of the equations of granular…
Recent work on the equilibrium and stability of ellipsoidal stellar systems is reviewed. The absence of constant-density cores in early-type galaxies implies that chaos and high-order resonances are generic features of the motion in…
We describe the dynamics of a stream of equally spaced macroscopic particles in orbit around a central body (e.g. a planet or star). A co-orbital configuration of small bodies may be subject to gravitational instability, which takes the…
The chaos in stellar systems is studied using the theory of dynamical systems and the Van Kampen stochastic differential equation approach. The exponential instability (chaos) of spherical N-body gravitating systems, already known…
Small perturbations in spherical and thin disk stellar clusters surrounding massive a black hole are studied. Due to the black hole, stars with sufficiently low angular momentum escape from the system through the loss cone. We show that…
We study a spherical, self-gravitating fluid model, which finds applications in cosmic structure formation. We argue that since the system features nonlinearity and gravity-induced dispersion, the emergence of solitons becomes possible. We…
We study the dynamical instability in spherical gravitating systems with core using the Ricci curvature criterion. By means of numerical estimations of the Ricci curvature for static N-body systems, it is shown that the core can both,…
A long-standing question is whether radiative cooling can lead to local condensations of cold gas in the hot atmospheres of galaxies and galaxy clusters. We address this problem by studying the nature of local instabilities in rotating,…
This paper continues a series reporting different aspects of the behaviour of disc galaxy simulations that support spiral instabilities. The focus in this paper is to demonstrate how linear spiral instabilities saturate and decay, and how…
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…
The saturation conditions for bending modes in inhomogeneous thin stellar disks that follow from an analysis of the dispersion relation are compared with those derived from $N$-body simulations. In the central regions of inhomogeneous…
We have performed a series of high resolution N-body experiments on a Connection Machine CM-5 in order to study the stability of collisionless self-gravitating spherical systems. We interpret our results in the framework of symplectic…
A new theory of gravitational shocking based on time-dependent perturbation theory shows that the changes in energy and angular momentum due to a slowly varying disturbance are not exponentially small for stellar dynamical systems in…
The thermal stability of rotating, stratified, unmagnetized atmospheres is studied by means of linear-perturbation analysis, finding stability, overstability or instability, depending on the properties of the gas distribution, but also on…
We investigate the Hierarchical Gravitational Fragmentation scenario through numerical simulations of the prestellar stages of the collapse of a marginally gravitationally unstable isothermal sphere immersed in a strongly gravitationally…
The stability of rotating isotropic spherical stellar systems is investigated by using N-body simulations. Four spherical models with realistic density profiles are studied: one of them fits the luminosity profile of globular clusters,…
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…