Rawiraswattana, K. and Goodwin, S.P. orcid.org/0000-0001-6396-581X (2023) On encounter rates in star clusters. The Astrophysical Journal, 947 (1). 12. ISSN 0004-637X
Abstract
Close encounters between stars in star-forming regions are important as they can perturb or destroy protoplanetary disks, young planetary systems, and multiple-star systems. We simulate simple, virialized, equal-mass N-body star clusters and find that both the rate and the total number of encounters between stars vary by factors of several in statistically identical clusters due to the stochastic/chaotic details of the orbits and stellar dynamics. Encounters tend to "saturate" rapidly in the core of a cluster, with stars there each having many encounters, while more distant stars have none. However, we find that the fraction of stars that has had at least one encounter within a particular distance grows in the same way (scaling with the crossing time and half-mass radius) in all clusters, and we present a new (empirical) way of estimating the fraction of stars that has had at least one encounter at a particular distance.
Metadata
Authors/Creators: |
|
||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2023 The Authors. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. | ||||
Keywords: | Star clusters; Circumstellar disks; N-body simulations; Gravitational interaction | ||||
Dates: |
|
||||
Institution: | The University of Sheffield | ||||
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Science (Sheffield) > Department of Physics and Astronomy (Sheffield) | ||||
Funding Information: |
|
||||
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield | ||||
Date Deposited: | 20 Apr 2023 11:04 | ||||
Last Modified: | 20 Apr 2023 11:04 | ||||
Status: | Published | ||||
Publisher: | American Astronomical Society | ||||
Refereed: | Yes | ||||
Identification Number: | https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/acc104 |