Related papers: Chaos and Elliptical Galaxies
I give a very brief review of aspects of internal dynamics that affect the global shape of a galaxy, focusing on triaxiality, bars and warps. There is general agreement that large central masses can destroy triaxial shapes, but recent…
Orbits in the principal planes of triaxial potentials are known to be prone to unstable motion normal to those planes, so that three dimensional investigations of those orbits are needed even though they are two dimensional. We present here…
The emergence of chaotic motion is discussed for hard-point like and soft collisions between two particles in a one-dimensional box. It is known that ergodicity may be obtained in hard-point like collisions for specific mass ratios…
The regularity/chaoticity of orbits of 45 globular clusters in the central region of the Galaxy with a radius of 3.5 kpc, which are subject to the greatest influence of the elongated rotating bar, is analyzed. Various methods of analysis…
We have analysed the distribution of inclination-corrected galaxy concentrations in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. We find that unlike most galaxy properties, which are distributed bimodally, the distribution of concentrations is trimodal:…
ABBREVIATED ABSTRACT: This paper summarises an investigation of the effects of weak friction and noise in time-independent, nonintegrable potentials which admit both regular and stochastic orbits. The aim is to understand the qualitative…
Without the interference of a number of events, galaxies may suffer in crowded environments (e.g., stripping, harassment, strangulation); isolated elliptical galaxies provide a control sample for the study of galaxy formation. We present…
We use probability density functions (pdfs) of sums of orbit coordinates, over time intervals of the order of one Hubble time, to distinguish weakly from strongly chaotic orbits in a barred galaxy model. We find that, in the weakly chaotic…
We demonstrate that the nuclei of galaxies containing supermassive black holes can be triaxial in shape. Schwarzschild's method was first used to construct self-consistent orbital superpositions representing nuclei with axis ratios of…
We analyze the orbital dynamics of spherical test bodies in ``black hole surrounded by dark matter halo'' spherically symmetric spacetimes. When the test body pulsates periodically (such as a variable star), altering its quadrupole tensor,…
The physical basis of chaos in the solar system is now better understood: in all cases investigated so far, chaotic orbits result from overlapping resonances. Perhaps the clearest examples are found in the asteroid belt. Overlapping…
Instabilities in compact planetary systems are generically driven by chaotic dynamics. This implies that an instability time measured through direct N-body integration is not exact, but rather represents a single draw from a distribution of…
We consider spatiotemporal chaotic systems for which spatial correlation functions decay substantially over a length scale xi (the spatial correlation length) that is small compared to the system size L. Numerical simulations suggest that…
We study the motion of a spinning test particle in Schwarzschild spacetime, analyzing the Poincar\'e map and the Lyapunov exponent. We find chaotic behavior for a particle with spin higher than some critical value (e.g. $S_{cr} \sim 0.64…
The order and chaos of the motion near equilibrium points in the potential of a rotating highly irregular-shaped celestial body are investigated from point of view of the dynamical system theory. The positions of the non-degenerate…
We study the behavior of orbits in two different galactic dynamical models, describing the motion in the central parts of a triaxial elliptical galaxy with a dense nucleus. Numerical experiments show that both models display regular motion…
We consider the orbits of particles with spin in the Schwarzschild spacetime. Using the Papapetrou-Dixon equations of motion for spinning particles, we solve for the orbits and focus on those that exhibit chaos using both Poincar\'e maps…
This talk summarises what is currently understood about the phenomenon that has come to be known as {\it chaotic mixing}. The first part presents a concise statement as to what chaotic mixing actually is, and then explains why it should be…
Everything you ever wanted to know about what has come to be known as ``chaotic mixing:'' This paper describes the evolution of localised ensembles of initial conditions in 2- and 3-D time-independent potentials which admit both regular and…
Spatiotemporally chaotic dynamics of a Kuramoto-Sivashinsky system is described by means of an infinite hierarchy of its unstable spatiotemporally periodic solutions. An intrinsic parametrization of the corresponding invariant set serves as…