The Dynamics of Spherical Stellar Systems: II.--Theoretical Models

Non - Spherical Stellar Models of Compact Stars

Stability of rotating spherical stellar systems

We study the stability of rotating collisionless self-gravitating spherical systems by using high resolution N-body experiments on a Connection Machine CM-5. We added rotation to Ossipkov-Merritt (hereafter OM) anisotropic spherical systems by using two methods. The first method conserves the anisotropy of the distribution function defined in the OM algorithm. The second method distorts the sys...

Stellar Dynamics of Dense Stellar Systems

Stellar dynamics is almost unreasonably well suited for an implementation in terms of special-purpose hardware. Unlike the case of molecular dynamics, stellar dynamics deals exclusively with a long-range force, gravity, which leads to a computational cost scaling as the square of the number of stars involved. While special tricks can lead to a reduction of this cost from ∼ N2 to ∼ N logN in the...

Cusped Spherical Stellar Systems with Anisotropic Velocities

Spherical models with constant velocity anisotropy β have distribution functions depending on binding energy E and angular momentum L of the form f (E, L) = L−2β fE(E). An inversion for the unknown function fE (E) is straightforward to derive and reduces to Eddington’s famous algorithm for isotropic models (β = 0). Importantly, if the anisotropy parameter of the model is a half-integer constant...

The Spherical Symmetry of Static Stellar Systems in General Relativity

Abstract. A conjecture of many years standing in General Relativity is that static stellar models, under physically reasonable assumptions, must be spherically symmetric. Despite some real progress in the last eighteen years (Beig and Simon, Masood-ul-Alam) a proof of the conjecture, in its full generality, has remained elusive. We consider asymptotically flat, perfect fluid, static stellar spa...