Chaos in elliptical galaxies

J.C. MUZZIO

La Plata

Otro; Third La Plata International School on Astronomy and Geophysics: Chaos, diffusion and non-integrability in Hamiltonian Systems; 2011

Facultad de Ciencias Astronomicas y Geofisicas de la UNLP

pre.cjk { font-family: "WenQuanYi Zen Hei Mono",monospace; }pre.ctl { font-family: "Lohit Devanagari",monospace; }p { margin-bottom: 0.08inDEJO AQUI ACLARADO, POR NO HABER OTRO LUGAR DONDE HACERLO, QUE EL TRABAJDO FUE ENVIADO A PUBLICAR EN DICIEMBRE DE 2011 Y ACEPTADO EN FEBRERO DE 2012. Here I present a review of the work done on the presence and effects of chaos in elliptical galaxies plus some recent results we obtained on this subject. The fact that important fractions of the orbits that arise in potentials adequate to represent elliptical galaxies are chaotic is nowadays undeniable. Alternatively, it has been difficult to build selfconsistent models of elliptical galaxies that include significant fractions of chaotic orbits and, at the same time, are stable. That is specially true for cuspy models of elliptical galaxies which seem to best represent real galaxies. I argue here that there is no physical impediment to build such models and that the difficulty lies in the method of Schwarzschild, widely used to obtain such models. Actually, I show that there is no problem in obtaining selfconsistent models of elliptical galaxies, even cuspy ones, that contain very high fractions of chaotic orbits and are, nevertheless, highly stable over time intervals of the order of a Hubble time.