Local Virial Relation and Velocity Anisotropy for Collisionless Self-Gravitating Systems

Abstract

The collisionless quasi-equilibrium state realized after the cold collapse of self-gravitating systems has two remarkable characters. One of them is the linear temperature-mass (TM) relation, which yields a characteristic non-Gaussian velocity distribution. The other is the local virial (LV) relation, the virial relation which holds even locally in collisionless systems through phase mixing such as cold-collapse. A family of polytropes is examined from a view point of these two characters. The LV relation imposes a strong constraint on these models: only polytropes with index n ∼ 5 with a flat boundary condition at the center are compatible with the numerical results, except for the outer region. Using the analytic solutions based on the static and spherical Jeans equation, we show that this incompatibility in the outer region implies the important effect of anisotropy of velocity dispersion. Furthermore, the velocity anisotropy is essential in explaining various numerical results under the condition of the local virial relation.