Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics
Scientific paper
1997-09-10
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
15 Tex pages, 7 Postscript figures. To appear in the Twelfth Annual Florida Workshop in Nonlinear Astronomy and Physics: Long
Scientific paper
10.1111/j.1749-6632.1998.tb08957
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 of the galaxy. Here, chaotic diffusion rates are presented for orbits in triaxial models with a range of central density slopes and nuclear black-hole masses. Typical diffusion times are found to be less than a galaxy lifetime in triaxial models where the density increases more rapidly than 1/r at the center, or which contain black holes with masses that exceed roughly 0.1% of the galaxy mass. When the mass of a central black hole exceeds roughly 0.02 times the mass of the galaxy, there is a transition to global stochasticity and the galaxy evolves to an axisymmetric shape in little more than a crossing time. This rapid evolution may provide a negative feedback mechanism that limits the mass of nuclear black holes to a few percent of the stellar mass of a galaxy.
Merritt David
Valluri Monica
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