Chaos in Gravitational N-Body Systems

The Workshop on Chaos in Gravitational N -Body Systems was held in La Plata, Argentina, from July 31 through August 3, 1995. The School of Astronomy and Geophysics of La Plata National University, best known as La Plata Observatory, was the host institution. The Observatory (cover photo) was founded in 1883, and it has nowadays about 120 faculty members and 70 non-faculty members devoted to teaching and research in different areas of astronomy and geophysics. It was very nice to see how many people, from young students to well recognized authorities in the field, came to participate in the meeting. This audience success was due to the increasing understanding of the neces sity to gather together people from Celestial Mechanics and Stellar Dynamics to explore the problems that exist at the frontier of these two disciplines and their common interest in chaotic phenomena and integrability (the famous Argentine beef was, certainly, also an attraction!). All the papers of the present volume were refereed. Most were accepted after some revision, while some needed no change at all (compli ments to their authors!) and, sadly, a few could not be included. About half a dozen authors did not submit their contributions for publication, mainly because they were already in print elsewhere. Therefore, the special issue of Celestial Mechanics and Dynamical Astronomy includes all the invited lectures of the workshop, while the proceedings volume includes those same lectures plus the bulk of, but Bot all, the contributions to the meeting.

Proceedings of a Workshop held at La Plata (Argentina), July 31-August 3, 1995

Spectra of stretching numbers and helicity angles in dynamical systems.- On the measure of the structure around the last KAM torus before and after its break-up.- Some comments on numerical methods for chaos problems.- Information entropy.- Chaos and elliptical galaxies.- Sinking, tidally stripped, galactic satellites.- On the satellite capture problem.- Chaotic transitions in resonant asteroidal dynamics.- Structure of the phase-space in the 3D problem of the 2/1 and the 3/2 Jupiter resonance.- Large scale chaos and marginal stability in the solar system.- Chaos in the solar system.- Geometrodynamics, chaos and statistical behaviour of N-body systems.- Geometrodynamics on Finsler spaces.- Stability of motion of N-body systems.- Microscopic dynamics of one-dimensional self-gravitational many-body systems.- Numerical exploration of the dynamics of self-adjoint S-type Riemann ellipsoids.- On the possibility of 2D dynamical chaos in astrophysical disks.- The observed turbulent spectrum of cloudy population of the Milky Way as an evidence of a weak Rossby wave turbulence.- On the accuracy in the numerical treatment of some chaotic problems.- The Liapunov exponent as a tool for exploring phase space.- Information entropy as a tool for searching periodicity.- Painleve analysis of simple Kaluza-Klein models.- Nonlinear analysis of a classical cosmological model.- Nontrivial dynamics and inflation.- A model distribution function for violently relaxed N-body systems.- Global dynamics of the logarithmic galactic potential by means of frequency map analysis.- Numerical stability of Osipkov-Merritt models.- Structure of galactic satellites.- Dynamical friction effects on sinking satellites.- Gravitational scattering experiments in infinite homogeneous N-body systems.- Dominant roles of binary and triple collisions in the free-fall three-body disruption.- Dynamical consequences of Uranus' great collision.- Runaway growth of planetesimals.- Secondary resonances inside the 2/1 Jovian commensurability.- Applications of Fourier and wavelet analyses to the resonant asteroidal motion.- Spectra of winding numbers of chaotic asteroidal motion.