Reconstructing the initial relaxation time of young star clusters in the Large Magellanic Cloud

Open Access
Authors
Publication date 2008
Host editors
  • A. de Koter
  • L.J. Smith
  • L.B.F.M. Waters
Book title Mass Loss from Stars and the Evolution of Stellar Clusters
Book subtitle proceedings of a workshop held at Lunteren, the Netherlands, 29 May-1 June 2006
ISBN
  • 9781583816448
ISBN (electronic)
  • 9781583816455
Series Astronomical Society of the Pacific conference series
Event Mass loss from stars and the evolution of stellar clusters, Lunteren, the Netherlands
Pages (from-to) 329-336
Publisher San Francisco: Astronomical Society of the Pacific
Organisations
  • Faculty of Science (FNWI) - Informatics Institute (IVI)
  • Faculty of Science (FNWI) - Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy (API)
Abstract
We reconstruct the initial two-body relaxation time at the half mass radius for a sample of young ≤ 300 Myr star clusters in the Large Magellanic cloud. We achieve this by simulating star clusters with 12288 to 131072 stars using direct N-body integration. The equations of motion of all stars are calculated with high precision direct N-body simulations which include the effects of the evolution of single stars and binaries. We find that the initial relaxation times of the sample of observed clusters in the Large Magellanic Cloud ranges from about 200 Myr to about 2Gyr. The reconstructed initial half-mass relaxation times for these clusters have a much narrower distribution than the currently observed distribution, which ranges over more than two orders of magnitude.
Document type Conference contribution
Language English
Published at http://www.aspbooks.org/a/volumes/article_details/?paper_id=28704
Downloads
296237.pdf (Submitted manuscript)
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