Abstract

The kinetics of collapse and explosion transitions in microcanonical self-gravitating ensembles were analyzed. A system of point particles interacting through a soft Coulomb potential and confined to a spherical container was considered. It was found that for 100-200 particles, collapse took around 103-104 particle crossing times to complete. It was also found that the slow energy exchange between a higher-temperature compact core and a relatively cold diluted halo resulted in such a long collapse time.