Related papers: Cusps and Triaxiality
We present a technique for constructing equilibrium triaxial N-body haloes with nearly arbitrary density profiles, axial ratios and spin parameters. The method is based on the way in which structures form in hierarchical cosmological…
This paper summarises an investigation of chaos in a toy potential which mimics much of the behaviour observed for the more realistic triaxial generalisations of the Dehnen potentials, which have been used to model cuspy triaxial galaxies…
A rotating continuum of particles attracted to each other by gravity may be modeled by the Euler-Poisson system. The existence of solutions is a very classical problem. Here it is proven that a curve of solutions exists, parametrized by the…
The shape of a galaxy is constrained both by mechanisms of formation (dissipational vs. dissipationless) and by the available orbit families (the shape and amount of regular and stochastic orbits). It is shown that, despite the often very…
The stellar velocity fields of elliptical galaxies hold clues to their dynamical structure and origin. The construction of velocity field models is greatly simplified by assuming an approximate geometrical form for the streamlines of the…
Packing problems have been of great interest in many diverse contexts for many centuries. The optimal packing of identical objects has been often invoked to understand the nature of low temperature phases of matter. In celebrated work,…
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 variety of modeling techniques is used with surface photometry from the literature and recently acquired high-accuracy stellar kinematic data to constrain the three-dimensional mass distribution in the luminous cuspy elliptical galaxy NGC…
We construct stable axially symmetric models of elliptical galaxies. The particle density on phase space for these models depends monotonically on the particle energy and on the third component of the angular momentum. They are obtained as…
We study the kinematics of gaseous disks in triaxial dark matter halos using the closed-loop orbit solutions in non-axisymmetric potentials. The orbits are in general non-circular and, for given triaxiality, their ellipticity depends on the…
Schwarzschild models of a Plummer sphere were constructed and compared with analytical results to test the robustness of Schwarzschild's method and its efficiency in probing the degeneracy of the solution space. The method was then used to…
We describe a one-parameter family of models of stable spherical stellar systems in which the phase-space distribution function depends only on energy. The models have similar density profiles in their outer parts ($\rho\propto r^{-4}$) and…
Lens models appropriate for representing cusped galaxies and clusters are developed. The analogue of the odd number theorem for cusped density distributions is given. Density cusps are classified into strong, isothermal or weak, according…
We use numerical simulations to explore biases that arise in dynamical estimates of the mean mass profile for a collection of galaxy clusters that have been stacked to make a composite. There are three types of bias. One arises from…
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…
We survey the properties of all orbit families in the rotating frame of a family of realistic triaxial potentials with central supermassive black holes (SMBHs). In such galaxies, most regular box orbits (vital for maintaining triaxiality)…
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…
Fully analytical dynamical models usually have an infinite extent, while real star clusters, galaxies, and dark matter haloes have a finite extent. The standard method for generating dynamical models with a finite extent consists of taking…
It is shown that the cuspy density distributions observed in the cores of elliptical galaxies can be realized by dissipationless gravitational collapse. The initial models consist of power-law density spheres such as $\rho\propto r^{-1}$…
We use both N-body simulations and integration in fixed potentials to explore the stability and the long-term secular evolution of self-consistent, equilibrium, non-rotating, triaxial spheroidal galactic models. More specifically, we…