Related papers: When Stars Collide
Close encounters and physical collisions between stars in young dense clusters may lead to the formation of very massive stars and black holes via runaway merging. We examine critically some details of this process, using N-body simulations…
Stellar mergers are responsible for a large variety of astrophysical phenomena. They form blue straggler stars, give rise to spectacular transients, and produce some of the most massive stars in the Universe. Here, we focus on mergers from…
Close encounters and physical collisions between stars in young dense clusters can result in new channels for stellar evolution, and may lead to the formation of very massive stars and black holes via runaway merging. We present some…
The evolution of young compact star clusters is studied using N-body simulations in which both stellar evolution and physical collisions between stars are taken into account. The initial conditions are chosen to represent R136, a compact…
In the cores of young dense star clusters repeated stellar collisions involving the same object can occur, which has been suggested to lead to the formation of an intermediate-mass black hole. In order to verify this scenario we compute the…
In young dense clusters repeated collisions between massive stars may lead to the formation of a very massive star (above 100 Msun). In the past the study of the long-term evolution of merger remnants has mostly focussed on collisions…
In young star clusters, the density can be high enough and the velocity dispersion low enough for stars to collide and merge with a significant probability. This has been suggested as a possible way to build up the high-mass portion of the…
The high stellar densities in young compact star clusters, such as the star cluster R 136 in the 30 Doradus region, may lead to a large number of stellar collisions. Such collisions were recently found to be much more frequent than previous…
Using Monte Carlo codes, we follow the collisional evolution of clusters in a variety of scenarios. We consider the conditions under which a cluster of main sequence stars may undergo rapid core collapse due to mass segregation, thus…
When a binary star system is tidally disrupted by a supermassive black hole at a galactic nucleus, one star is ejected at a high speed while the other remains in a tightly bound orbit around the black hole. The cluster of tightly bound…
This chapter describes the current state of models of individual blue stragglers. Stellar collisions, binary mergers (or coalescence), and partial or ongoing mass transfer have all been studied in some detail. The products of stellar…
The observational consequences of the merger scenario for massive star formation are explored and contrasted with the gradual accumulation of mass by accretion. Protostellar mergers may produce high luminosity infrared flares lasting years…
We use direct N-body simulations of gas embedded star clusters to study the importance of stellar collisions for the formation and mass accretion history of high-mass stars. Our clusters start in virial equilibrium as a mix of gas and…
Globular clusters were thought to be simple stellar populations, but recent photometric and spectroscopic evidence suggests that the clusters' early formation history was more complicated. In particular, clusters show star-to-star abundance…
We investigate the evolution of collisionally merged stars with mass of ~100 MSun which might be formed in dense star clusters. We assumed that massive stars with several tens Msun collide typically after ~1Myr of the formation of the…
Stellar mergers and common-envelope evolution are fast (dynamical-timescale) interactions in binary stars that drastically alter their evolution. They are key to understanding a plethora of astrophysical phenomena. Stellar mergers are…
We study close encounters involving massive main sequence stars and the evolution of the exotic products of these encounters as common--envelope systems or possible hypernova progenitors. We show that parabolic encounters between low-- and…
In the present paper we combine an N-body code that simulates the dynamics of young dense stellar systems with a massive star evolution handler that accounts in a realistic way for the effects of stellar wind mass loss. We discuss two…
We study the occurrence of physical collisions between stars in young and compact star cluster. The calculations are performed on the GRAPE-4 with the starlab software environment which include the dynamical evolution and the nuclear…
We present a new study of the collisional runaway scenario to form an intermediate-mass black hole (IMBH, MBH > 100 Msun) at the centre of a young, compact stellar cluster. The first phase is the formation of a very dense central core of…