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
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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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: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Science (Sheffield) > Department of Physics and Astronomy (Sheffield) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY FACILITIES COUNCIL ST/V000853/1 |
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: | 10.3847/1538-4357/acc104 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:198311 |