A family of lowered isothermal models

Abstract

We present a family of self-consistent, spherical, lowered isothermal models, consisting of one or more mass components, with parametrized prescriptions for the energy truncation and for the amount of radially biased pressure anisotropy. The models are particularly suited to describe the phase-space density of stars in tidally limited, mass-segregated star clusters in all stages of their life-cycle. The models extend a family of isotropic, single-mass models by Gomez-Leyton and Velazquez, of which the well-known Woolley, King and Wilson (in the non-rotating and isotropic limit) models are members. We derive analytic expressions for the density and velocity dispersion components in terms of potential and radius, and introduce a fast model solver in PYTHON (LIMEPY), that can be used for data fitting or for generating discrete samples.