Two-dimensional flows with high Reynolds numbers have the striking property of organizing spontaneously into coherent structures. The robustness of Jupiter's Great Red Spot, a huge vortex persisting for more than three centuries in a turbulent shear between two zonal jets, is probably related to this general phenomenon. Similarly, it is striking to observe that galaxies themselves follow a kind of organization revealed in the Hubble classification or in de Vaucouleur's R{sup}(1/4) law for the surface brightness of ellipticals (Binney & Tremaine, 1987). We shall discuss some analogies between stellar systems and 2D vortices and show that their structure and organization can be understood from relatively similar statistical mechanics [for a short review on this subject see Chavanis (1998a)].
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