4 ms·
This is not my specialty so I may be getting some details wrong here. I don't mean so much that globular clusters are ergodic as few-body interactions are ergo
by antognini 10y ago
This is not my specialty so I may be getting some details wrong here. I don't mean so much that globular clusters are ergodic as few-body interactions are ergodic. It has at least been proven that three-body interactions are chaotic, which implies that all microstates are accessible to the system. This is a necessary requirement for ergodicity, but I don't believe that it implies that the interactions are necessarily ergodic. All I really know is that in practice globular clusters are observed to obey equipartition of energy, as are the average outcomes of large numbers of few-body interactions.