Long-term evolution of stellar self-gravitating systems away from thermal equilibrium: connection with nonextensive statistics

Phys Rev Lett. 2003 May 9;90(18):181101. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.90.181101. Epub 2003 May 8.

Abstract

With particular attention to the recently postulated introduction of a nonextensive generalization of Boltzmann-Gibbs statistics, we study the long-term stellar dynamical evolution of self-gravitating systems on time scales much longer than the two-body relaxation time. In a self-gravitating N-body system confined in an adiabatic wall, we show that the quasiequilibrium sequence arising from the Tsallis entropy, so-called stellar polytropes, plays an important role in characterizing the transient states away from the Boltzmann-Gibbs equilibrium state.