Journal article
TIDAL DISRUPTION, GLOBAL MASS FUNCTION, AND STRUCTURAL PARAMETER EVOLUTION IN STAR CLUSTERS
Michele Trenti, Enrico Vesperini, Mario Pasquato
The Astrophysical Journal | IOP PUBLISHING LTD | Published : 2010
Abstract
We present a unified picture for the evolution of star clusters on the two-body relaxation timescale. We use direct N-body simulations of star clusters in a galactic tidal field starting from different multimass King models, up to 10% of primordial binaries and up to N = 65, 536 particles. An additional run also includes a central Intermediate Mass Black Hole. We find that for the broad range of initial conditions we have studied the stellar mass function of these systems presents a universal evolution, which depends only on the fractional mass loss. The structure of the system, as measured by the core to half-mass radius ratio, also evolves toward a universal state, which is set by the ef..
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Awarded by NASA ATFP
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Awarded by National Center for Supercomputing Applications
Funding Acknowledgements
We thank Douglas Heggie and the referee for useful suggestions. We are grateful to Sverre Aarseth for his dedication to constantly improving its NBODY6 code and for making every improvement publicly available. We also thank Keigo Nitadori for the development of the CUDA/OpenMP extension of the code. M. T. and E. V. acknowledge partial support from NASA ATFP grants NNX08AH29G, NNX08AH15G and from grant HSTAR-11284, provided by NASA through a grant from STScI, which is operated by AURA, Inc., under NASA contract NAS 5-26555. All the authors acknowledge support from the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, through the National Science Foundation grant PHY05-51164. This research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation through TeraGrid resources provided by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (grants TG-AST090045 and TG-AST090094).