Modeling Gas Evacuation Mechanisms in Present-Day Globular Clusters: Stellar Winds from Evolved Stars and Pulsar Heating

Abstract

We employ hydrodynamical simulations to investigate the underlying mechanism responsible for the low levels of gas and dust in globular clusters. Our models examine the competing effects of energy and mass supply from the various components of the evolved stellar population for globular clusters 47 Tucanae, M15, NGC 6440, and NGC 6752. Ignoring all other gas evacuation processes, we find that the energy output from the stars that have recently turned off the main sequence are capable of effectively clearing the evolved stellar ejecta and producing intracluster gas densities consistent with current observational constraints. This result distinguishes a viable gas and dust evacuation mechanism that is ubiquitous in globular clusters. In addition, we extend our analysis to probe the efficiency of pulsar wind feedback in globular clusters. The detection of intracluster ionized gas in 47~Tucanae allows us to place particularly strict limits on pulsar wind thermalization efficiency, which must be extremely low in the cluster's core in order to be in accordance with the observed density constraints.

13 pages, 9 figures, published to MNRAS

References in corpus (17)

• Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (MESA)
• MESA Isochrones and Stellar Tracks (MIST). I: Solar-Scaled Models
• Time-Dependent Ionization in Radiatively Cooling Gas
• An asymmetric shock wave in the 2006 outburst of the recurrent nova RS Ophiuchi
• Rotating Globular Clusters
• X-rays from the Globular Cluster G1: Intermediate Mass Black Hole or Low Mass X-ray Binary?
• A Spitzer Space Telescope Atlas of omega Centauri: The Stellar Population, Mass Loss, and the Intracluster Medium
• Stellar Populations and Mass-Loss in M15: A Spitzer Detection of Dust in the Intra-Cluster Medium
• Bayesian Mass Estimates of the Milky Way II: The dark and light sides of parameter assumptions
• Constraining Globular Cluster Age Uncertainties Using the IR Color-Magnitude Diagram
• Ejection of globular cluster interstellar media through ionization by white dwarfs
• A Spitzer search for cold dust within globular clusters
• The absolute age of the globular cluster M15 using near-infrared adaptive optics images from PISCES/LBT
• A peculiar HI cloud near the distant globular cluster Pal 4
• Diffuse X-ray emission in globular cluster cores
• Clearing the Dust from Globular Clusters
• Probing the Galactic Bulge with deep Adaptive Optics imaging: the age of NGC 6440

Cited by in corpus (5)

• The Physics of Star Cluster Formation and Evolution
• Enhanced mass-loss rate evolution of stars with $\gtrsim 18M_{\odot }$ and missing optically-observed type II core-collapse supernovae
• Wideband Monitoring Observations of PSR J1803-3002A in the Globular Cluster NGC 6522
• Millisecond Pulsars in Dense Star Clusters: Evolution, Scaling Relations, and the Galactic-Center Gamma-ray Excess
• Globular cluster formation with multiple stellar populations: A single-binary composite scenario