Gravothermal oscillations in multi-component models of star clusters

Abstract

In this paper, gravothermal oscillations are investigated in multi-component star clusters which have power law initial mass functions (IMF). For the power law IMFs, the minimum masses ($m_{min}$) were fixed and three different maximum stellar masses ($m_{max}$) were used along with different power-law exponents ($\alpha$) ranging from 0 to -2.35 (Salpeter). The critical number of stars at which gravothermal oscillations first appear with increasing $N$ was found using the multi-component gas code SPEDI. The total mass ($M_{tot}$) is seen to give an approximate stability condition for power law IMFs with fixed values of $m_{max}$ and $m_{min}$ independent of $\alpha$. The value $M_{tot}/m_{max}\simeq 12000$ is shown to give an approximate stability condition which is also independent of $m_{max}$, though the critical value is somewhat higher for the steepest IMF that was studied. For appropriately chosen cases, direct N-body runs were carried out in order to check the results obtained from SPEDI. Finally, evidence of the gravothermal nature of the oscillations found in the N-body runs is presented.

9 pages, 3 figures, 8 tables. Accepted for publication in MNRAS

References in corpus (1)

• Accelerating NBODY6 with Graphics Processing Units

Cited by in corpus (14)

• Concurrent formation of supermassive stars and globular clusters: implications for early self-enrichment
• Dynamical evolution of black hole sub-systems in idealised star clusters
• An Overabundance of Black Hole X-Ray Binaries in the Galactic Center from Tidal Captures
• The moment of core collapse in star clusters with a mass function
• Discovery of a double Blue Straggler sequence in M15: new insight into the core-collapse process
• The impact of metallicity-dependent mass loss versus dynamical heating on the early evolution of star clusters
• Gravothermal Catastrophe: the dynamical stability of a fluid model
• Three-Body Binary Formation in Clusters: Analytical Theory
• The hunt for self-similar core collapse
• MUSE narrow field mode observations of the central kinematics of M15
• The Merger Rate of Black Holes in a Primordial Black Hole Cluster
• When do star clusters become multiple star systems? II. Toward a half-life formalism with four bodies
• Dynamics and merger rate of primordial black holes in a cluster
• Self-similar orbit-averaged Fokker-Planck equation for isotropic spherical dense clusters (iii) application of pre-collapse solution to Galactic globular clusters