Analytical galactic models with mild stellar cusps

Abstract

In the past two decades, it has been established by high-resolution observations of early-type galaxies that their nuclear surface brightness and corresponding stellar mass densities are characterized by cusps. In this paper, we present a new spherical analytical model family describing mild cuspy centres. We study isotropic and anisotropic models of Osipkov-Merritt type. It is shown that the associated distribution functions and intrinsic velocity dispersions can be represented analytically in a unified way in terms of hypergeometric series, allowing thus a straightforward comparison of these important global quantities for galaxies having underlying mass densities which may differ significantly in their degree of central cuspiness or radial falloff.