NEMO is a toolbox for users and programmers with which a wide range of experimental situations can be constructed, dynamically evolved, and analyzed. Primarily geared towards stellar dynamics, NEMO is by no means restricted to it. Great importance has been given to making the package extendible and to exibly import and export data. NEMO has been implemented within, and integrated into, the UNIX...

The stellar dynamics of ! Centauri are inferred from the radial velocities of 469 stars measured with CORAVEL (Mayor et al. 1997). Rather than t the data to a family of models, we generate estimates of all dynamical functions nonparametrically, by direct operation on the data. The cluster is assumed to be oblate and edge-on but mass is not assumed to follow light. The mean motions are consisten...

I compare gas-dynamical and stellar-dynamical models of collisions. These two models have distinctly different physics; for example , shocks introduce irreversibility in gas systems, while stellar systems evolve in a completely reversible fashion. Nonetheless, both models yield broadly similar results, suggesting that analogies between gas and stellar dynamics have some heuristic validity even ...

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 ∼ N 2 to ∼ N log N in t...

Stellar dynamics shares these equations with celestial mechanics (a term which is used here to denote the study of the orbital dynamics of bodies in the solar system), but there are important differences of emphasis. In stellar dynamics all masses are comparable, whereas in celestial mechanics one mass tends to dominate (either the sun or a primary). This has an effect on the methods used and t...