Related papers: On chaotic behavior of gravitating stellar shells
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…
Matter and dark matter in galaxies represent two main components linked by the gravitational interaction. Collisions of galaxies may create an offset between the centers of mass of these components. Ignoring internal dynamics of particles…
I argue that the widely adopted framework of stellar dynamics survived since 1940s, is not fitting the current knowledge on non-linear systems. Borrowed from plasma physics when several fundamental features of perturbed non-linear systems…
An understanding of the dynamics of differentially rotating systems is key to many areas of astrophysics. We investigate the oscillations of a simple system exhibiting differential rotation, and discuss issues concerning the role of…
We study the gravitational collapse of two thin shells of matter, in asymptotically flat spacetime or constrained to move within a spherical box. We show that this simple two-body system has surprisingly rich dynamics, which includes prompt…
We consider thin spherical shells of matter in both Newtonian gravity and general relativity, and examine their equilibrium configurations and dynamical stability. Thin-shell models are admittedly a poor substitute for realistic stellar…
The structure, kinematics and dynamics of the Galactic stellar halo are reviewed including evidence of substructure in the spatial distribution and kinematics of halo stars. Implications for galaxy formation theory are subsequently…
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…
We investigate the regular or chaotic nature of star orbits moving in the meridional plane of an axially symmetric galactic model with a disk and a spherical nucleus. We study the influence of some important parameters of the dynamical…
This paper presents two interesting scaling laws, which relate some critical exponents in the critical behavior of spherically symmetric gravitational collapses. These scaling laws are independent of the details of gravity theory under…
Our previous study of a system of bodies assumed to move along almost circular orbits around a central mass, approximately described by Hill's equations, is extended to "exotic" [alias non-commutative] particles. For a certain critical…
The subject of this paper are spherically symmetric thin shells made of barotropic ideal fluid and moving under the influence of their own gravitational field as well as that of a central black hole; the cosmological constant is assumed to…
A new theory of gravitational shocking based on time-dependent perturbation theory shows that the changes in energy and angular momentum due to a slowly varying disturbance are not exponentially small for stellar dynamical systems in…
In the present article, we use an axially symmetric galactic gravitational model with a disk-halo and a spherical nucleus, in order to investigate the transition from regular to chaotic motion for stars moving in the meridian (r,z) plane.…
A model of the thin shell expanding into a uniform ambient medium is developed. Density perturbations are described using equations with linear and quadratic terms, and the linear and the nonlinear solutions are compared. We follow the time…
We describe the dynamics of a stream of equally spaced macroscopic particles in orbit around a central body (e.g. a planet or star). A co-orbital configuration of small bodies may be subject to gravitational instability, which takes the…
We use a simple dynamical model in order to investigate the regular or chaotic character of orbits in a barred galaxy with a central, spherically symmetric, dense nucleus and a flat disk. In particular, we explore how the total orbital…
We consider the dynamics of timelike spherical thin matter shells in vacuum. A general formalism for thin shells matching two arbitrary spherical spacetimes is derived, and subsequently specialized to the vacuum case. We first examine the…
We use a composite gravitational galactic model consisting of a disk, a halo, a massive nucleus and a strong nuclear bar, in order to study the connections between global and local parameters in a realistic dynamical system. The local model…
The kinetic motion of the stars of a galaxy is considered within the framework of a relativistic scalar theory of gravitation. This model, even though unphysical, may represent a good laboratory where to study in a rigorous, mathematical…