Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Sep 1998
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1998cemda..72...37p&link_type=abstract
Celestial Mechanics and Dynamical Astronomy, v. 72, Issue 1/2, p. 37-67 (1998).
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Gravity, Dynamics, N-Body Problem, Galaxies, Stellar Clusters, Gravity, Dynamics, N-Body Problem, Galaxies, Stellar Clusters
Scientific paper
An elementary review about stellar and galactic dynamics is presented. Despite involving extremely classical Newtonian physics, stellar dynamics presents some fundamental difficulties rarely discussed in the literature, such as why the phase space distribution is assumed to be a smooth function of coordinates. Many systems are found to be unstable over intermediate time-scales, as more instabilities have been discovered over the years, so the old aim of describing equilibrium stable systems shifts presently toward understanding evolutive systems. From the linearized variational Boltzmann equation a distinction can be made between instabilities triggered by the chaotic part of phase space, and instabilities caused by steep gradients in the velocity part of the distribution function. The new challenges to include evolutive systems can presently only be studied efficiently with computer techniques. Future studies are likely to involve orders of magnitude more advanced computers in which parallelism will play a major role.
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