Related papers: Regular and chaotic motion in softened gravitation…
Using the Ricci and scalar curvatures of the configuration manifold of gravitational N-body systems, we study the exponential instability in their trajectories. It is found that the exponentiation time-scale for isotropic Plummer spheres…
We revisit the r\^{o}le of discreteness and chaos in the dynamics of self-gravitating systems by means of $N$-body simulations with active and frozen potentials, starting from spherically symmetric stationary states and considering the…
The evolution of closed gravitational systems is studied by means of $N$-body simulations. This, as well as being interesting in its own right, provides insight into the dynamical and statistical mechanical properties of gravitational…
This paper summarises a numerical investigation of the statistical properties of orbits evolved in `frozen,' time-independent N-body realisations of smooth, time-independent density distributions, allowing for 10^(2.5)<N<10^(5.5). Two…
This paper continues a numerical investigation of orbits evolved in `frozen,' time-independent N-body realisations of smooth time-independent density distributions corresponding to both integrable and nonintegrable potentials, allowing for…
One of the fundamental aspects of statistical behaviour in many-body systems is exponential divergence of neighbouring orbits, which is often discussed in terms of Liapounov exponents. Here we study this topic for the classical…
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…
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…
Dissipationless N-body models of rotating galaxies, iso-energetic to a non-rotating model, are examined as regards the mass in regular and in chaotic motion. The values of their spin parameters $\lambda$ are near the value $\lambda=0.22$ of…
Intrinsic instability of trajectories characterizes chaotic dynamical systems. We report here that trajectories can exhibit a surprisingly high degree of stability, over a very long time, in a chaotic dynamical system. We provide a detailed…
We study the stability in finite times of the trajectories of interacting particles. Our aim is to show that in average and uniformly in the number of particles, two trajectories whose initial positions in phase space are close, remain…
Self-gravitating systems of $N$ particles are chaotic. We wonder how chaotic the Galaxy is, and what the consequences are. We therefore simulate the dynamical evolution of a galaxy-scale distribution of point masses in order to measure the…
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 origin of equilibrium gravitational configurations is sought in terms of the stability of their trajectories, as described by the curvature of their Lagrangian configuration manifold of particle positions --- a context in which subtle…
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…
The orbits of stars in galaxies are generically chaotic: the chaotic behavior arises in part from the intrinsically grainy nature of a potential that is composed of point masses. Even if the potential is assumed to be smooth, however,…
To improve our understanding of orbital instabilities in compact planetary systems, we compare suites of $N$-body simulations against numerical integrations of simplified dynamical models. We show that, surprisingly, dynamical models that…
This paper summarises a number of new, potentially significant, results, obtained recently by the author and his collaborators, which impact on various issues related to the gravitational N-body problem, both Newtonianly and in the context…
The long timescale evolution of a self-gravitating system is generically driven by two-body encounters. In many cases, the motion of the particles is primarily governed by the mean field potential. When this potential is integrable,…
We investigate the old problem of the fast relaxation of collisionless $N$-body systems which are collapsing or perturbed, emphasizing the importance of (non-collisional) discreteness effects. We integrate orbit ensembles in fixed external…