What is it about?
Kinetic theory is a branch of physics that is concerned with the evolution of systems consisting of an extremely large number of interacting bodies. The best-understood kinetic theories deal with gases (such as the air in the Earth's atmosphere) and plasmas (such as the wind that is ejected from the Sun). The subject of this article is the kinetic theory of stellar systems. In particular, we describe how one can use gas- and plasma-kinetic ideas to understand systems such as galaxies and star clusters, which consist of millions or billions of stars all interacting via gravity.
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Why is it important?
Telescopes like the James Webb Space Telescope are currently providing unprecedentedly detailed observations of galaxies, challenging our ideas of how galaxies form and evolve. If we are to understand what we are seeing we need a solid theoretical basis, which is what the kinetic theory of stellar systems is supposed to provide. However, there are no dedicated textbooks or review articles on this topic. This tutorial article is intended to fill that gap.
Perspectives
In the 1960s and 1970s the kinetic theory of stellar systems was a fledgling subject which developed in tandem with the kinetic theory of plasmas. However, the two fields have long since diverged. Yet once one has become fluent in both Plasmaish and Galacticese, and has a dictionary relating the two, one can pull ideas directly from one field to solve a problem in the other. So our aim in this article was not only to teach people about stellar systems, but also to demonstrate that stellar dynamics and plasma kinetics are, in a useful sense, the same thing!
Chris Hamilton
Institute for Advanced Study
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Kinetic theory of stellar systems: A tutorial, Physics of Plasmas, December 2024, American Institute of Physics,
DOI: 10.1063/5.0204214.
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