  We review the inclusion of dark energy into the formalism of spherical
collapse, and the virialization of a two-component system, made of matter and
dark energy. We compare two approaches in previous studies. The first assumes
that only the matter component virializes, e.g. as in the case of a classic
cosmological constant. The second approach allows the full system to virialize
as a whole. We show that the two approaches give fundamentally different
results for the final state of the system. This might be a signature
discriminating between the classic cosmological constant which cannot virialize
and a dynamical dark energy mimicking a cosmological constant. This signature
is independent of the measured value of the equation of state. An additional
issue which we address is energy non-conservation of the system, which
originates from the homogeneity assumption for the dark energy. We propose a
way to take this energy loss into account.
