Analytical families of 2-component anisotropic polytropes and their relativistic extensions

TL;DR

This paper introduces a broad family of two-component anisotropic polytropic models for astrophysical systems, extends them into the relativistic regime, and analyzes their physical and mathematical properties, including energy conditions and mass.

Contribution

It presents a new wide-ranging family of anisotropic polytropic models, extends these models relativistically, and explores their physical properties and applications to astrophysical systems.

Findings

The models include hypervirial, Plummer, Hernquist, and NFW-like models.

Relativistic extensions satisfy energy conditions within certain parameters.

Hypervirial models have finite total mass and matching relativistic and Newtonian parameters.

Abstract

In this paper, we study a family of two-component anisotropic polytropes which model a wide range of spherically symmetric astrophysical systems such as early-type baryonic galaxies. This family is found to contain a large class of models such as the hypervirial family (which satisfy the virial theorem locally), the Plummer and Hernquist models and Navarro-Frenk-White (NFW)-like models. The potential--density pair for these models are derived, as well as their velocity dispersions and anisotropy parameters. The projected quantities are computed and found to reduce to analytical expressions in some cases. The first section of this paper presents an extension of the two-term anisotropic polytropes to encompass a very wide range of potential-density pairs. In the next section, we present the general relativistic extension of the potential-density pair, and calculate the stress-energy tensor, the relativistic anisotropy parameter, the velocity of circular orbits and the angular momentum. Remarkably, for the case of the hypervirial family, the relativistic pressure in the Newtonian limit and the relativistic anisotropy parameter are found to coincide with the corresponding Newtonian expressions. The weak, dominant and strong energy conditions are found to be satisfied only for a certain range of the free parameters. We show that the relativistic hypervirial family also has a finite total mass like its Newtonian counterpart. In the first appendix, a relativistic extension of a different hypervirial family of models is studied, and the relativistic anisotropy parameter is found to coincide with the Newtonian one. Finally, we present a family of models obtained from our distribution function that are similar to the Ossipkov-Merritt models; by computing their anisotropy parameters, we show that they model systems with isotropic cores and radially anisotropic exteriors.