Pushing the frontiers of gravitational encounters and collisionless dynamics
Abstract
The long range nature of gravity complicates the dynamics of self-gravitating many-body systems such as galaxies and dark matter (DM) halos. Relaxation/equilibration of perturbed galaxies and cold dark matter halos is typically a collective, collisionless process. Depending on the perturbation timescale, this process can be impulsive/fast, adiabatic/slow or resonant. First, I shall present a linear perturbative formalism to compute the response (in all three regimes) of disk galaxies to external perturbations such as satellite impacts. I shall elucidate how phase-mixing of the disk response gives rise to phase-space spirals akin to those observed by Gaia in the Milky Way disk, and how these features can be used to constrain the Milky Way’s potential as well as its dynamical history. Next, I shall discuss the secular evolution of a massive perturber due to the back reaction of the near-resonant response of the host galaxy/halo. In this context I shall present two novel techniques to model the secular torque (dynamical friction) experienced by the perturber: 1. a self-consistent, time-dependent, perturbative treatment and 2. a non-perturbative orbit-based framework. These two approaches explain the origin of certain secular phenomena observed in N-body simulations of cored galaxies but unexplained in the standard Chandrasekhar and LBK theories of dynamical friction, namely core-stalling and dynamical buoyancy. I shall briefly discuss some astrophysical implications of these phenomena: potential choking of supermassive black hole mergers in cored galaxies, and the possibility of constraining the inner density profile (core vs cusp) of DM dominated dwarf galaxies and therefore the DM particle nature.