Related papers: Chaos and Elliptical Galaxies
We study the coherent dynamics of globally coupled maps showing macroscopic chaos. With this term we indicate the hydrodynamical-like irregular behaviour of some global observables, with typical times much longer than the times related to…
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…
In the first paper of this series we used the N--body method to build a dozen cuspy (gamma ~ 1) triaxial models of stellar systems, and we showed that they were highly stable over time intervals of the order of a Hubble time, even though…
We study the distinction and quantification of chaotic and regular motion in a time-dependent Hamiltonian barred galaxy model. Recently, a strong correlation was found between the strength of the bar and the presence of chaotic motion in…
This paper uses the assumptions of ergodicity and a microcanonical distribution to compute estimates of the largest Lyapunov exponents in lower-dimensional Hamiltonian systems. That the resulting estimates are in reasonable agreement with…
If you are given a simple three-dimensional autonomous quadratic system that has only one stable equilibrium, what would you predict its dynamics to be, stable or periodic? Will it be surprising if you are shown that such a system is…
The structural properties of elliptical galaxies are consistent with their formation in a merging hierarchy. In this picture, the role of gaseous processes and dissipation decreased with increasing mass creating preferentially rotationally…
Several long, dynamically cold stellar streams have been observed around the Milky Way Galaxy, presumably formed from the tidal disruption of globular clusters. In integrable potentials---where all orbits are regular---tidal debris…
The pattern speeds of spiral galaxies are closely related to the flow of material in their disks. Flows that follow the `precessing ellipses' paradigm (see e.g., Kalnajs 1973) are likely associated with slowly rotating spirals, which have…
There is a long tradition of studying chaotic trajectories in systems whose integrability is broken by means of an external perturbation. Here we explore a different route to chaos, in the dynamics of extended bodies, which arises due to…
There is strong evidence that the mass in the Universe is dominated by dark matter, which exerts gravitational attraction but whose exact nature is unknown. In particular, all galaxies are believed to be embedded in massive haloes of dark…
We numerically study quantum chaos properties of long-range XXZ dipolar Hamiltonian spin systems. Two geometries are considered: (i) an open chain with 19 spins, (ii) a face-centered cubic lattice with 14 spins. Energy level-spacing…
Recent work by Shenker, Stanford, and Kitaev has related the black hole horizon geometry to chaotic behavior. We extend this from eternal black holes to black holes that form and then evaporate. This leads to an identity for the change in…
Recently we estimated that about 5 percent of supermassive black hole triple systems are fundamentally unpredictable. These gargantuan chaotic systems are able to exponentially magnify Planck length perturbations to astronomical scales…
Disturbed spiral galaxies with high rates of star formation pervaded clusters of galaxies just a few billion years ago, but nearby clusters exclude spirals in favor of ellipticals. ``Galaxy harassment" (frequent high speed galaxy…
An algorithm to characterize collective motion is presented, with the introduction of ``collective Lyapunov exponent'', as the orbital instability at a macroscopic level. By applying the algorithm to a globally coupled map, existence of…
While the motion of particles near a rotating, electrically-neutral (Kerr), and charged (Kerr--Newman) black hole is always strictly regular, a perturbation in the gravitational or the electromagnetic field generally leads to chaos. The…
We study the role of asymptotic curves in supporting the spiral structure of a N-body model simulating a barred spiral galaxy. Chaotic orbits with initial conditions on the unstable asymptotic curves of the main unstable periodic orbits…
This paper summarises an investigation of the effects of low amplitude noise and periodic driving on phase space transport in 3-D Hamiltonian systems, a problem directly applicable to systems like galaxies, where such perturbations reflect…
For the past decade there has been a considerable debate about the existence of chaos in the mixmaster cosmological model. The debate has been hampered by the coordinate, or observer dependence of standard chaotic indicators such as…