Research Note

Revealing the influence of dark matter on the nature of motion and the families of orbits in axisymmetric galaxy models

Department of Physics, Section of Astrophysics, Astronomy & MechanicsAristotle University of Thessaloniki, 541 24 Thessaloniki, Greece
e-mail: evzotos@physics.auth.gr

Received: 24 July 2013
Accepted: 20 November 2013

Abstract

An axially symmetric galactic gravitational model composed of a dense, massive and spherical nucleus with an additional dark matter halo component was used to distinguish between the regular and chaotic character of orbits of stars that move in the meridional plane (R,z). We investigated two different cases: (i) a flat-disk galaxy; (ii) an elliptical galaxy. It is of particular interest to reveal how the portion of the dark matter inside the main body of the galaxy influences the ordered or chaotic nature of motion. Varying the ratio of dark matter to stellar mass, we monitored the evolution not only of the percentage of chaotic orbits, but also of the percentages of orbits that compose the main regular resonant families, by classifying regular orbits into different families. Moreover, we tried to reveal how the starting position of the parent periodic orbits of each regular family changes with respect to the fractional portion of dark matter. We compared our results with previous similar work.