Order out of Randomness : Self-Organization Processes in Astrophysics

TL;DR

This paper explores how self-organization processes in astrophysics create order from chaos across various cosmic systems, driven by internal forces and feedback mechanisms.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of 16 self-organization processes across multiple astrophysical disciplines, highlighting their mechanisms and models.

Findings

Identification of common drivers like gravity and rotation.

Examples of instabilities leading to order formation.

Use of hydrodynamic, MHD, and N-body models.

Abstract

Self-organization is a property of dissipative nonlinear processes that are governed by an internal driver and a positive feedback mechanism, which creates regular geometric and/or temporal patterns and decreases the entropy, in contrast to random processes. Here we investigate for the first time a comprehensive number of 16 self-organization processes that operate in planetary physics, solar physics, stellar physics, galactic physics, and cosmology. Self-organizing systems create spontaneous {\sl order out of chaos}, during the evolution from an initially disordered system to an ordered stationary system, via quasi-periodic limit-cycle dynamics, harmonic mechanical resonances, or gyromagnetic resonances. The internal driver can be gravity, rotation, thermal pressure, or acceleration of nonthermal particles, while the positive feedback mechanism is often an instability, such as the magneto-rotational instability, the Rayleigh-B\'enard convection instability, turbulence, vortex attraction, magnetic reconnection, plasma condensation, or loss-cone instability. Physical models of astrophysical self-organization processes involve hydrodynamic, MHD, and N-body formulations of Lotka-Volterra equation systems.