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Stability of Elliptical Galaxies. Numerical Experiments

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 August 2017

David Merritt
David Merritt*
Affiliation:
Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1A1, Canada

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The idea that dynamical instabilities might play an important role in determining the equilibrium structure of elliptical galaxies is a startling one, especially to those of us who are accustomed to associating instabilities with rapidly-rotating systems like disk galaxies. The shock is even greater when we learn that these instabilities have been taken seriously by workers in the Soviet Union for a long time. As Dr. Polyachenko points out in his talk, instabilities affecting spherical, non-rotating galaxies were being discussed by Soviet astronomers as long ago as 1972. Much of this work has recently become more accessible through the publication of an English-language version of Fridman and Polyachenko's monograph, Physics of Gravitating Systems (Fridman and Polyachenko 1984). In the West, it appears that only two people were prescient enough to systematically test the stability of spherical models before learning of the Soviet work (Hénon 1973; Barnes 1985). In particular, Barnes discovered independently that a spherical system composed of predominantly radial orbits evolves rapidly into a bar. Subsequent work has demonstrated that even some mildly anisotropic models can be unstable in this way.

Type
Invited Reviews
Information
Symposium - International Astronomical Union , Volume 127: Structure and Dynamics of Elliptical Galaxies , 1987 , pp. 315 - 329
Copyright
Copyright © Reidel 1987 

References

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