AAS 198th Meeting, June 2001
Session 85. Bars and Black Holes in Galaxies
Oral, Thursday, June 7, 2001, 2:00-3:30pm, C101-103

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[85.05] Intrinsic Shapes of Elliptical Galaxies with Supermassive Black Holes

M.Y. Poon, D. Merritt (Rutgers University)

The presence of a central point mass representing a supermassive black hole of power-law triaxial galaxy divides the phase space into three radial regions. At lowest energies, the motion is essentially regular, due to the nearly-Keplerian force field from the central point mass. At intermediate energies, regular tube orbits which avoid the black hole persist, but the remaining orbits become increasingly chaotic. The transition to a ``zone of chaos'' occurs rapidly as a function of energy, when the enclosed stellar mass is a few times the mass of the black hole. At high energies, stable resonant boxlike orbits which avoid the center begin to replace the chaotic orbits. Since chaos forces galaxies to have axisymmetric shapes, we attempt to find self-consistent solution for triaxial nuclei within the radius where global transition to chaos occurs. Schwarzschild's orbital- superposition method is used.


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