Steady states in galactic dynamics (Q1884707)

By minimizing the energy for the Vlasov-Poisson system under a constraint, Guo and Rein have constructed a large class of isotropic, spherically symmetric steady states. They have shown that an isolated minimizer is automatically dynamically stable under general (i.e., not necessarily symmetric) perturbations. The main result of the present work is to remove the assumption that the minimizer must be isolated, so minimizers are stable even if they are not isolated. It is also shown that the Lagrange multipliers associated with all minimizers have the same value. Finally, an example where two distinct minimizers exist is studied numerically.