Related papers: Henry Kandrup's Ideas About Relaxation of Stellar …
The term ``violent relaxation'' was coined by Donald Lynden-Bell as a memorable oxymoron describing how a stellar dynamical system relaxes from a chaotic initial state to a quasi-equilibrium. His analysis showed that this process is rapid,…
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…
Stellar systems - star clusters, galaxies, dark matter haloes, and so on - are ubiquitous characters in the evolutionary tale of our Universe. This tutorial article is an introduction to the collective dynamical evolution of the very large…
Some points related to the exponential instability of N-body gravitating systems and which are misinterpreted in various papers are clarified. Exponential instability is a phenomenon essentially responsible for the relaxation, evolutionary,…
The nonexponential relaxation ocurring in complex dynamics manifested in a wide variety of systems is analyzed through a simple model of diffusion in phase space. It is found that the inability of the system to find its equilibrium state in…
Hybrid dynamical systems have proven to be a powerful modeling abstraction, yet fundamental questions regarding the dynamical properties of these systems remain. In this paper, we develop a novel class of relaxations which we use to recover…
This article reviews Michel Henon's contributions to a diverse set of problems in astrophysical dynamics, including violent relaxation, Saturn's rings, roundoff error in orbit integrations, and planet formation.
The concept of plasma relaxation as a constrained energy minimization is reviewed. Recent work by the authors on generalizing this approach to partially relaxed three-dimensional plasma systems in a way consistent with chaos theory is…
A spherical system with arbitrary mean velocities in the radial and transverse directions, but with zero dispersion of radial velocities, is considered as a model describing the violent relaxation of star clusters and galaxies. The model…
The major problem posed by the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam work was the relaxation (thermalization) of a many-body system. We review two approaches to this problem, the ergodic theory and Langevin (stochastic) equation ones, which have been applied…
Why do galactic bars rotate with high pattern speeds, when dynamical friction should rapidly couple the bar to the massive, slowly rotating dark halo? This longstanding paradox may be resolved by considering the dynamical interactions…
General aspects about the thermodynamics of astrophysical systems are discussed, overall, those concerning to astrophysical systems in mutual interaction (or the called \emph{open astrophysical systems}). A special interest is devoted along…
The traditional Chandrasekhar picture of the slow relaxation of stellar systems assumes that stars' orbits are only modified by occasional, uncorrelated, two-body flyby encounters with other stars. However, the long-range nature of gravity…
The cosmological relaxion can address the hierarchy problem, while its coherent oscillations can constitute dark matter in the present universe. We consider the possibility that the relaxion forms gravitationally bound objects that we…
The discovery of dynamical friction was Chandrasekhar's best known contribution to the theory of stellar dynamics, but his work ranged from the few-body problem to the limit of large N (in effect, galaxies). Much of this work was summarised…
The relaxation systems are an important subclass of the passive systems that arise naturally in applications. We exploit the fact that they have highly structured state-space realisations to derive analytical solutions to some simple…
This article is devoted to the long-time dynamics of point-vortex type systems near thermal equilibrium and to the possible emergence of collisional relaxation. More precisely, we consider a tagged particle coupled to a large number of…
Hysteresis can be defined from a dynamical systems perspective with respect to equilibrium points. Consequently, hysteresis naturally lends itself as a topic to illustrate and extend concepts in a dynamical systems course. A number of…
[Abridged] Recently we have found that a family of models of partially relaxed, anisotropic stellar systems, inspired earlier by studies of incomplete violent relaxation, exhibits some interesting thermodynamic properties. Here we present a…
Two-imcompressible phase model of star is briefly revised. Effects of rotation and general relativity are considered.