Collisional Stellar Dynamics in General Relativity: An Overview

Recently, Israel and Kandrup (1984; Kandrup 1984 a,b,c,d) have formulated a new, manifestly covariant approach to non-equilibrium statistical mechanics in classical general relativity. The object here is to indicate how that formalism may be used to construct a theory of ‘collisional’ stellar dynamics, valid for a collection of point mass stars in the limit that incoherent radiative effects may be neglected.