English

Survivability of a star cluster in a dispersing molecular cloud

Astrophysics 2008-04-18 v1

Abstract

Star clusters are formed in molecular clouds which are believed to be the birth places of most stars. From recent observational data, Lada & Lada 2003 estimated that only 4% to 7% of the clusters embedded inside molecular clouds have survived. An important mechanism for the disruption of embedded (bound)-clusters is the dispersion of the parent cloud by UV radiation, stellar winds and/or supernova explosions. In this work we study the effect of this mechanism by N-body simulations. We find that most embedded-clusters survive for more than 30 Myr even when different initial conditions of the cluster may introduce some minor variations, but the general result is rather robust.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0804.2734,
  title  = {Survivability of a star cluster in a dispersing molecular cloud},
  author = {Hui-Chen Chen and Chung-Ming Ko},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0804.2734},
  year   = {2008}
}

Comments

9 pages, 16 figures, submitted to MNRAS

R2 v1 2026-06-21T10:31:55.146Z