Introduction
The long range of gravity and the slow "relaxation" of stellar systems prevent the use of the methods of statistical physics, as stellar dynamical orbits tend to be much more irregular and chaotic than celestial mechanical orbits.
The "relaxation" of stars is the process deflecting the individual trajectories of stars from the one they would have if the distribution of matter was perfectly smooth. The "2-body relaxation" is induced by the individual star-star interactions, while the "violent relaxation" is induced by a large collective variation of the stellar system shape.
Read more about this topic: Stellar Dynamics
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