Analytical galactic models with mild stellar cusps

Abstract

In the past two decades, it has been established by high-resolution observations of early-type galaxies that their nuclear surface brightness and corresponding stellar mass densities are characterized by cusps. In this paper, we present a new spherical analytical model family describing mild cuspy centres. We study isotropic and anisotropic models of Osipkov-Merritt type. It is shown that the associated distribution functions and intrinsic velocity dispersions can be represented analytically in a unified way in terms of hypergeometric series, allowing thus a straightforward comparison of these important global quantities for galaxies having underlying mass densities which may differ significantly in their degree of central cuspiness or radial falloff.

9 pages, 2 figures; accepted for publication in MNRAS; different format than previous version

References in corpus (3)

• Self-consistent models of cuspy triaxial galaxies with dark matter haloes
• Orbital Instabilities in a Triaxial Cusp Potential
• Completely analytical families of anisotropic gamma-models

Cited by in corpus (4)

• The Effect of a Single Supernova Explosion on the Cuspy Density Profile of a Small-Mass Dark Matter Halo
• Analytical families of 2-component anisotropic polytropes and their relativistic extensions
• The double-power approach to spherically symmetric astrophysical systems
• An analytical approach to the dwarf galaxies cusp problem