Numerical simulations of rotating star clusters with 2 mass components

  • Published : 2011.04.05

Abstract

To understand the effect of the initial rotation for tidally bounded clusters with mass spectrum, we performed N-body simulations for the clusters with different degrees of initial rotation and compared to Fokker-Planck results. We confirmed that the cluster evolution is accelerated by the initial rotation as well as the mass spectrum. For the slowly rotating models, the time evolution of mass, energy and angular momentum show good agreements between N-body and Fokker-Planck calculations. On the other hand, for the rapidly rotating models, there are significant differences between two approaches at the beginning of the evolution. By investigating cluster shapes, we concluded that these differences are mainly due to secular instability that takes place for very rapidly rotating clusters. The shape of cluster for N-body simulations becomes tri-axial or even prolate, while the 2-dimensional Fokker-Planck simulation can treat only oblate type axisymmetric systems. We also founded that there is the angular momentum exchange from high mass to low mass.

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