Calibration of radii and masses of open clusters with a simulation

Abstract

Context: A recent new approach to apply a simple dynamical mass estimate of tidally limited star clusters is based on the identification of the tidal radius in a King profile with the dynamical Jacobi radius. The application to an unbiased open cluster catalogue yields significantly higher cluster masses compared to the classical methods. Aims: We quantify the bias in the mass determination as function of projection direction and cluster age by analysing a simulated star cluster. Methods: We use direct $N$-body simulations of a star cluster including stellar evolution in an analytic Milky Way potential and apply a best fit to the projected number density of cluster stars. Results: We obtain significantly overestimated star cluster masses which depend strongly on the viewing direction. The overestimation is typically in the range of 10-50 percent and reaches a factor of 3.5 for young clusters. Mass segregation reduces the derived limiting radii systematically.

9 pages, 10+1 figures, accepted by Astronomy and Astrophysics

References in corpus (3)

• Performance Analysis of Direct N-Body Algorithms on Special-Purpose Supercomputers
• Shape parameters of Galactic open clusters
• Open clusters and the galactic disk

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