Thermodynamics and Gravitation: From Glasses to Black Holes and Globular Star Clusters

TL;DR

This paper explores the connection between chaos in gravitational systems and thermodynamics, analyzing black holes and star clusters to show they obey thermodynamic laws despite unusual properties like negative specific heats.

Contribution

It extends thermodynamic analysis to gravitational systems, demonstrating their compliance with thermodynamic laws and discussing implications for black holes and globular clusters.

Findings

Black holes and star clusters obey thermodynamic laws.

Negative specific heats are present in these gravitational systems.

Thermodynamics can be applied to chaotic gravitational dynamics.

Abstract

The topic of this conference is ``The Chaotic Universe''. One of the main achievements of last century has been to relate chaos in fluids to their thermodynamics. It is our purpose to make connection between chaos in gravitation and standard thermodynamics. Though there have been many previous steps and attempts, so far no convincing conclusion has been reached. After explaining how the approach works for glasses, we shall discuss the thermodynamics of two specific systems: black holes and globular star clusters. In both cases we point out that the dynamics satisfies the first and second law of thermodynamics, though negative specific heats occur.