Related papers: Orbital instability and relaxation in stellar syst…
The motion of stars in the gravitational potential of a triaxial galaxy is generically chaotic. However, the timescale over which the chaos manifests itself in the orbital motion is a strong function of the degree of central concentration…
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…
As a first step towards a comprehensive investigation of stellar motions within globular clusters, we present here the results of a study of stellar orbits in a mildly triaxial globular cluster that follows a circular orbit inside a galaxy.…
The gravitational potentials of realistic galaxy models are in general non-integrable, in the sense that they admit orbits that do not have three independent isolating integrals of motion and are therefore chaotic. However, if chaotic…
A new element is proposed to play a role in the evolution of extrasolar planetary systems: the tidal (or elliptical) instability. It comes from a parametric resonance and takes place in any rotating fluid whose streamlines are (even…
Recent work on the equilibrium and stability of ellipsoidal stellar systems is reviewed. The absence of constant-density cores in early-type galaxies implies that chaos and high-order resonances are generic features of the motion in…
We investigate the stability of trajectories in barred galaxies with mildly triaxial halos by means of Liapunov exponents. This method is perfectly suitable for time-dependent 3D potentials where surfaces of sections and other simple…
We analyze the motion of a {\it massless} and {\it chargeless} particle very near to the event horizon. It reveals that the radial motion has exponential growing nature which indicates that there is a possibility of inducing chaos in the…
This paper continues a numerical investigation of orbits evolved in `frozen,' time-independent N-body realisations of smooth time-independent density distributions corresponding to both integrable and nonintegrable potentials, allowing for…
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…
Here I review recent work, by other authors and by myself, on some particular topics related to the regular and chaotic motion in elliptical galaxies. I show that it is quite possible to build highly stable triaxial stellar systems that…
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…
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…
Strong nonlinear effects combined with diffusive coupling may give rise to unpredictable evolution in spatially extended deterministic dynamical systems even in the presence of a fully negative spectrum of Lyapunov exponents. This regime,…
Some points related to the exponential instability of N-body gravitating systems and which are misinterpreted in various papers are clarified. Exponential instability is a phenomenon essentially responsible for the relaxation, evolutionary,…
We investigate the timescales for stochasticity and chaotic mixing in a family of triaxial potentials that mimic the distribution of light in elliptical galaxies. Some of the models include central point masses designed to represent nuclear…
We study the phase-space behaviour of nearby trajectories in integrable potentials. We show that the separation of nearby orbits initially diverges very fast, mimicking a nearly exponential behaviour, while at late times it grows linearly.…
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…
(Abridged) This paper studies chaotic orbit ensembles evolved in triaxial generalisations of the Dehnen potential which have been proposed to model ellipticals with a strong density cusp that manifest significant deviations from…
We explore the regular or chaotic nature of orbits of stars moving in the meridional (R,z) plane of an axially symmetric time-dependent disk galaxy model with a central, spherically symmetric nucleus. In particular, mass is linearly…