Dynamical Friction on extended perturbers

Abstract

Following a wave-mechanical treatment we calculate the drag force exerted by an infinite homogeneous background of stars on a perturber as this makes its way through the system. We recover Chandrasekhar's classical dynamical friction (DF) law with a modified Coulomb logarithm. We take into account a range of models that encompasses all plausible density distributions for satellite galaxies by considering the DF exerted on a Plummer sphere and a perturber having a Hernquist profile. It is shown that the shape of the perturber affects only the exact form of the Coulomb logarithm. The latter converges on small scales, because encounters of the test and field stars with impact parameters less than the size of the massive perturber become inefficient. We confirm this way earlier results based on the impulse approximation of small angle scatterings.