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