Classifying orbits of low and high energy stars in axisymmetric disk galaxies

TL;DR

This study investigates how the total energy affects the orbital structure of stars in axisymmetric disk galaxies, revealing that chaos dominates at low energies while regular motion prevails at high energies.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of the energy dependence of orbital chaos and regularity in galaxy models using SALI and spectral methods, highlighting the transition from chaos to order.

Findings

High chaos at low energy levels

Dominance of regular orbits at high energy levels

Emergence of secondary resonances at high energies

Abstract

The ordered or chaotic character of orbits of stars moving in the meridional $(R,z)$ plane of an analytic axisymmetric time-independent disk galaxy model with an additional spherically symmetric central nucleus is investigated. Our aim is to determine how the total energy influences the orbital structure of the galaxy. For this purpose we monitor how the percentage of chaotic orbits as well as the rates of orbits composing the main regular families evolve as a function of the value of the energy. In order to distinguish with certainty between chaotic and ordered motion we use the SALI method in extensive sets of initial conditions of orbits. Moreover, a spectral method is applied for identifying the various regular families and also for recognizing the secondary resonances that bifurcate from them. Our numerical computations suggest that for low energy levels the observed amount of chaos is high and the orbital content is rather poor, while for high energy levels, corresponding to global motion, regular motion dominates and many secondary higher resonances emerge. We also compared our results with previous related work.