Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Jan 2010
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010aas...21545805d&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #215, #458.05; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 42, p.483
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
Recent studies of the orbital structure of elliptical galaxies have shown that most elliptical galaxies are "fast rotators" which are likely to be axisymmetric systems, some of which even contain embedded disks (Cappellari et al. 2007,MNRAS,379,418). However the most luminous ellipticals tend to be slow rotators and display kinematics signatures that indicate that they are triaxial. It is now generally accepted that all elliptical galaxies contain supermassive black holes. There are few previous theoretical studies of the effects of figure rotation on the orbital properties of triaxial galaxies with supermassive black holes. This paper fills this gap in our theoretical understanding of elliptical galaxies, and we show that galaxy rotation can have a strong influence on orbital phase space. We also show that the phase space in rotating triaxial galaxies is rich in regular and chaotic regions even in the absence of black holes and steep cusps. Our study uses Laskar's frequency mapping technique (Laskar 1988, A&A, 198, 341), which allows us to map the phase space structure of the potentials, identify the regions of phase space occupied by regular and chaotic orbits, and to measure the orbital diffusion rates for chaotic orbits. We use realistic values of rotation speed, cusp slope, and black hole mass to explore the parameter space expected to be occupied by realistic, stable triaxial, elliptical galaxies. This work is supported in part by NSF grant AST-0908346.
Deibel Alex
Valluri Monica
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