Related papers: Chaos and Elliptical Galaxies
In classical loss cone theory, stars are supplied to a central black hole via gravitational scattering onto low angular momentum orbits. Higher feeding rates are possible if the gravitational potential near the black hole is…
Recent work on the construction of spherical, Axisymmetric and triaxial dynamical models for elliptical galaxies is reviewed briefly, including their role in providing evidence for dark halos and central black holes. The different orbital…
Stars and compact objects that plunge toward a black hole are either 1) captured, emitting gravitational waves as the orbit decays, 2) tidally disrupted, leaving a disc of baryonic material, 3) scattered to a large radius, where they may…
It is shown how the violation of the invariance of the $Z$-component of the orbital angular momentum $L_z$ in the axially symmetric potential of the Galaxy with a bar can serve as an indicator of the degree of orbital chaos of globular…
The evolution of galaxies is governed by equations with chaotic solutions: gravity and compressible hydrodynamics. While this micro-scale chaos and stochasticity has been well studied, it is poorly understood how it couples to macro-scale…
In the present article, we investigate the behavior of orbits in a time independent axially symmetric galactic type potential. This dynamical model can be considered to describe the motion in the central parts of a galaxy, for values of…
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…
This paper explores how orbits in a galactic potential can be impacted by large amplitude time-dependences of the form that one might associate with galaxy or halo formation or strong encounters between pairs of galaxies. A period of…
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…
Supermassive black holes in the centres of giant elliptical galaxies are thought to induce chaos and eliminate triaxiality in their hosts. We address whether this process operates in real systems, by modeling the stellar kinematics of the…
We prove that transport in the phase space of the "most strongly chaotic" dynamical systems has three different stages. Consider a finite Markov partition (coarse graining) $\xi$ of the phase space of such a system. In the first short times…
Box orbits in triaxial potentials are generically thin, that is, they lie close in phase space to a resonant orbit satisfying a relation of the form l\omega_1 +m\omega_2+n\omega_3=0 between the three fundamental frequencies. Resonant orbits…
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…
A 3D dynamical model with a quasi-homogeneous core and a disk component is used for the chaos control in the central parts of elliptical galaxy. Numerical experiments in the 2D system show a very complicated phase plane with a large chaotic…
Black holes binaries support unstable orbits at very close separations. In the simplest case of geodesics around a Schwarzschild black hole the orbits, though unstable, are regular. Under perturbation the unstable orbits can become the…
Chaos in the orbits of black hole pairs has by now been confirmed by several independent groups. While the chaotic behavior of binary black hole orbits is no longer argued, it remains difficult to quantify the importance of chaos to the…
We study the stability of trajectories near the disk plane of galaxy models with a triaxial dark matter halo component. We also examine the effect of weak discreteness noise, rapidly rotating bar perturbations and weak dissipation on these…
Dynamical chaos is a fundamental manifestation of gravity in astrophysical, many-body systems. The spectrum of Lyapunov exponents quantifies the associated exponential response to small perturbations. Analytical derivations of these…
Observational studies of galaxy isophotal shapes have shown that galaxy orientations are anisotropic: a galaxy's long axis tends to be oriented toward the center of its host. This radial alignment is seen across a wide range of scales, from…
We present cuspy, non-axisymmetric, scale-free mass models of discs, whose gravitational potentials are of St\"ackel form in parabolic coordinates. A black hole may be added at the centre, without in any way affecting the St\"ackel form;…