Should Elliptical Galaxies Be Idealised as Collisionless Equilibria?

Henry E. Kandrup

Published 2000-11-15, updated 2002-11-06Version 2

This talk summarises several different lines of argument suggesting that one should not expect cuspy nonaxisymmetric galaxies to exist as robust, long-lived collisionless equilibria, i.e., that such objects should not be idealised as time-independent solutions to the collisionless Boltzmann equation.