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Weakly Damped Modes In Star-Clusters And Galaxies, Md Weinberg
Weakly Damped Modes In Star-Clusters And Galaxies, Md Weinberg
Astronomy Department Faculty Publication Series
A perturber may excite a coherent mode in a star cluster or galaxy. If the stellar system is stable, it is commonly assumed that such a mode will be strongly damped and therefore of little practical consequence other than redistributing momentum and energy deposited by the perturber. This paper demonstrates that this assumption is false; weakly damped modes exist and may persist long enough to have observable consequences. To do this, a method for investigating the dispersion relation for spherical stellar systems and for locating weakly damped modes in particular is developed and applied to King models of varying concentration. …