Related papers: Periodic Orbits in Triaxial Galaxies with Weak Cus…
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)…
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 have constructed fully self-consistent models of triaxial galaxies with central density cusps. The triaxial generalizations of Dehnen's spherical models are presented, which have densities that vary as 1/r^gamma near the center and 1/r^4…
We present $N$--body models for triaxial elliptical galaxies or halos of galaxies, which are fully self--gravitating, have near constant axis ratio as a function of radius and a $r^{-1}$ central density cusp. Preliminary investigation…
Self-consistent solutions for triaxial mass models are highly non-unique. In general, some of these solutions might be dynamically unstable, making them inappropriate as descriptions of steady-state galaxies. Here we demonstrate for 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…
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…
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…
The radial-orbit instability is a collective phenomenon that has heretofore only been observed in spherical systems. We find that this instability occurs also in triaxial systems, as we checked by performing extensive N-body simulations…
Recent work on the dynamics of triaxial stellar systems is reviewed. The motion of boxlike orbits in realistic triaxial potentials is generically stochastic. The degree to which the stochasticity manifests itself in the dynamics depends on…
We construct numerical models of mildly triaxial elliptical galaxies with central density cusps. Using a technique we call ``adiabatic squeezing'', we begin with a spherical gamma=1 Hernquist model and apply a drag to the velocities of the…
Orbital motion in triaxial nuclei with central point masses, representing supermassive black holes, is investigated. The stellar density is assumed to follow a power law, rho ~ 1/r^gamma, with gamma=1 or gamma=2. At low energies the motion…
Statler (1987) demonstrated that self-consistent triaxial models with the perfect density law could be constructed for virtually any choice of axis ratios. His experiments are repeated here using triaxial mass models based on Jaffe's…
We investigate regular and chaotic two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) orbits of stars in models of a galactic potential consisting in a disk, a halo and a bar, to find the origin of boxy components, which are part of the bar or…
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…
Cuspy triaxial potentials admit a large number of chaotic orbits, which moreover exhibit extreme "stickiness" that makes the process of chaotic mixing surprisingly inefficient. Environmental effects, modeled as noise and/or periodic…
Recent results on chaos in triaxial galaxy models are reviewed. Central mass concentrations like those observed in early-type galaxies -- either stellar cusps, or massive black holes -- render most of the box orbits in a triaxial potential…
Luminous galaxies and their dark halos are likely to have triaxial shapes. The construction of distribution functions for triaxial systems is a hard problem, due to the existence of only one exact integral of motion, the energy $E$. Even…
We explore orbit properties of 35 prolate-triaxial galaxies selected from the Illustris cosmological hydrodynamic simulation. We present a detailed study of their orbit families, and also analyse relations between the relative abundance of…
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…