Chaotic orbits in galactic satellites

In several previous papers we had investigated the orbits of the stars that make up galactic satellites and found that many of those orbits were chaotic. In those investigations we made extensive use of the frequency analysis method of Carpintero and Aguilar (1998) to classify the orbits, because that method is much faster than the use of Lyapunov exponents, allows the classification of the regular orbits and our initial comparison of both methods had shown excellent agreement between their results. More recently, we have found some problems with the use of frequency analysis in rotating systems, so that here we present a new investigation of orbits inside galactic satellites using exclusively Lyapunov exponents. Some of our previous conclusions are confirmed, while others are altered. Besides, the Lyapunov times that are now obtained show that the time scales of the chaotic processes are shorter than, or comparable to, other time scales characteristic of galactic satellites.