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Session 49 - Elliptical Galaxies & Bulges.
Display session, Thursday, January 08
Exhibit Hall,
Elliptical galaxies and halos of spiral galaxies may in general be expected to have a triaxial figure. The only analytic models of triaxial figures have analytic cores, quite unlike most observed early type galaxies.
We present a family of numerically generated stable, cuspy, triaxial, self--gravitating spheroids, that provide a starting point for modeling of triaxial elliptical galaxies; studies into the long time scale stability of self--gravitating cuspy triaxial figures; and, the modeling of the response of cuspy triaxial systems to dynamically significant central point masses. The models provide a useful new family of systems that may be compared with the properties of observed elliptical galaxies and the halos of galaxies.
The orbit structure of the system is discussed, and initial results on the response of the models to central point masses are presented.
