  Important gaps remain in our understanding of the thermodynamics and
statistical physics of self-gravitating systems. Using mean field theory, here
we investigate the equilibrium properties of several spherically symmetric
model systems confined in a finite domain consisting of either point masses, or
rotating mass shells of different dimension. We establish a direct connection
between the spherically symmetric equilibrium states of a self-gravitating
point mass system and a shell model of dimension 3. We construct the
equilibrium density functions by maximizing the entropy subject to the usual
constraints of normalization and energy, but we also take into account the
constraint on the sum of the squares of the individual angular momenta, which
is also an integral of motion for these symmetric systems. Two new statistical
ensembles are introduced which incorporate the additional constraint. They are
used to investigate the possible occurrence of a phase transition as the
defining parameters for each ensemble are altered.
