Kavli Affiliate: Rainer Spurzem
| First 5 Authors: Yohai Meiron, Jeremy J. Webb, Jongsuk Hong, Peter Berczik, Rainer Spurzem
| Summary:
Massive globular clusters lose stars via internal and external processes.
Internal processes include mainly two-body relaxation, while external processes
include interactions with the Galactic tidal field. We perform a suite of
N-body simulations of such massive clusters using three different
direct-summation N-body codes, exploring different Galactic orbits and particle
numbers. By inspecting the rate at which a star’s energy changes as it becomes
energetically unbound from the cluster, we can neatly identify two populations
we call kicks and sweeps, that escape through two-body encounters internal to
the cluster and the external tidal field, respectively. We find that for a
typical halo globular cluster on a moderately eccentric orbit, sweeps are far
more common than kicks but the total mass loss rate is so low that these
clusters can survive for tens of Hubble times. The different N-body codes give
largely consistent results, but we find that numerical artifacts may arise in
relation to the time step parameter of the Hermite integration scheme, namely
that the value required for convergent results is sensitive to the number of
particles.
| Search Query: ArXiv Query: search_query=au:”Rainer Spurzem”&id_list=&start=0&max_results=10