Related papers: Orbital instability and relaxation in stellar syst…
The consequences of nuclear black holes for the structure and dynamics of stellar spheroids are reviewed. Slow growth of a black hole in a pre-existing core produces a steep power-law density profile similar to the cusps seen in faint…
Scattered disk objects (SDOs) are distant minor bodies that orbit the sun on highly eccentric orbits, frequently with perhelia near Neptune's orbit. Gravitational perturbations due to Neptune frequently lead to chaotic dynamics, with the…
Stellar pulsation is nowadays a widely understood subject. However, there has been no research about the effects of pulsations on the star's orbital dynamics throughout the galaxy. We investigate whether these oscillations can cause chaotic…
The Lyapunov exponent characterizes an exponential growth rate of the difference of nearby orbits. A positive Lyapunov exponent is a manifestation of chaos. Here, we propose the Lyapunov pair, which is based on the generalized Lyapunov…
Violent relaxation (VR) is often regarded as the mechanism leading stellar systems to collisionless meta equilibrium via rapid changes in the collective potential. We investigate the role of chaotic instabilities on single particle orbits…
In a recent publication, we have demonstrated that differentially rotating stars admit new channels of black hole formation via fragmentation instabilities. Since a higher order instability of this kind could potentially transform a…
We investigate the orbits of compact binary systems during the final inspiral period before coalescence by integrating numerically the second-order post-Newtonian equations of motion. We include spin-orbit and spin-spin coupling terms,…
The stability of the dynamical trajectories of softened spherical gravitational systems is examined, both in the case of the full $N$-body problem and that of trajectories moving in the gravitational field of non-interacting background…
Phase mixing of chaotic orbits exponentially distributes these orbits through their accessible phase space. This phenomenon, commonly called ``chaotic mixing'', stands in marked contrast to phase mixing of regular orbits which proceeds as a…
Orbital evolution is a critical process that sculpts planetary systems, particularly during their early stages where planet-disk interactions are expected to lead to the formation of resonant chains. Despite the theoretically expected…
The possibility for the occurrence in crystals of a phenomenon, resembling turbulence, is discussed. This phenomenon, called {\it heterophase turbulence}, is manifested by the fluctuational appearance inside a crystalline sample of…
A large sample of planet-planet scattering events for three planet systems with different orbital separations and masses is analyzed with a multiple regression model. The dependence of the time for the onset of instability on the masses of…
The extent of the continuous zone of chaotic orbits of a small-mass tertiary around a system of two gravitationally bound primaries (a double star, a double black hole, a binary asteroid, etc.) is estimated analytically, in function of the…
We use Laskar's frequency mapping technique to study the dynamics of triaxial galaxies with central density cusps and nuclear black holes. For ensembles of 10^4 orbits, we numerically compute the three fundamental frequencies of the motion,…
Figure rotation substantially increases the fraction of stochastic orbits in triaxial systems. This increase is most dramatic in systems with shallow cusps showing that it is not a direct consequence of scattering by a central density cusp…
Evolved stars dominate galactic spectra, enrich the galactic medium, expand to change their planetary systems, eject winds of a complex nature, produce spectacular nebulae and illuminate them, and transfer material between binary…
Many exoplanetary systems containing hot Jupiters are found to possess significant misalignment between the spin axis of the host star and the planet's orbital angular momentum axis. A possible channel for producing such misaligned hot…
We study the dynamics in the neighborhood of simple and double unstable periodic orbits in a rotating 3D autonomous Hamiltonian system of galactic type. In order to visualize the four dimensional spaces of section we use the method of color…
Here I present a review of the work done on the presence and effects of chaos in elliptical galaxies plus some recent results we obtained on this subject. The fact that important fractions of the orbits that arise in potentials adequate to…
(Abridged) The Galactic bar causes a characteristic splitting of the disc phase space into regular and chaotic orbit regions which is shown to play an important role in shaping the stellar velocity distribution in the Solar neighbourhood. A…