The early dynamical evolution of star clusters near the Galactic Centre

We examine the dynamical evolution of both Plummer sphere and substructured (fractal) star-forming regions in Galactic Centre (GC) strong tidal fields to see what initial conditions could give rise to an Arches-like massive star cluster by ∼2 Myr. We find that any initial distribution has to be contained within its initial tidal radius to survive, which sets a lower limit of the initial density of the Arches of ∼600 M⊙ pc−3 if the Arches is at 30 pc from the GC, or ∼200 M⊙ pc−3 if the Arches is at 100 pc from the GC. Plummer spheres that survive change little other than to dynamically mass segregate, but initially fractal distributions rapidly erase substructure, dynamically mass segregate and by 2 Myr look extremely similar to initial Plummer spheres, therefore it is almost impossible to determine the initial conditions of clusters in strong tidal fields.