Related papers: The Baltimore and Utrecht models for cluster disso…
Many embedded star clusters do not evolve into long-lived bound clusters. The most popular explanation for this "infant mortality" of young clusters is the expulsion of natal gas by stellar winds and supernovae, which leaves up to 90% of…
The distribution of the number of clusters as a function of mass M and age T suggests that clusters get eroded or dispersed in a regular way over time, such that the cluster number decreases inversely as an approximate power law with T…
Star clusters are found in all sorts of environments and their formation and evolution is inextricably linked to the star formation process. Their eventual destruction can result from a number of factors at different times, but the process…
How stellar clusters disrupt, and over what timescales, is intimately linked with how they form. Here, we review the theory and observations of cluster disruption, both the suggested initial rapid dissolution phase (infant mortality) and…
The evolution of star clusters is studied using N-body simulations in which the evolution of single stars and binaries are taken self-consistently into account. Initial conditions are chosen to represent relatively young Galactic open…
We investigate the dissolution process of young embedded star clusters with different primordial mass segregation levels using fractal distributions by means of N-body simulations. We combine several star clusters in virial and subvirial…
Infant mortality brought about by the expulsion of a star cluster's natal gas is widely invoked to explain cluster statistics at different ages. While a well studied problem, most recent studies of gas expulsion's effect on a cluster have…
The dissolution time (t_dis) of clusters in a tidal field does not scale with the ``classical'' expression for the relaxation time. First, the scaling with N, and hence cluster mass, is shallower due to the finite escape time of stars.…
We compare the observed bivariate distribution of masses(M) and ages(t) of star clusters in the LMC with the predicted distributions g(M,t) from 3 idealized models for the disruption of star clusters: (1)sudden mass-dependent…
(Abridged) The dynamical ejection of stars from star clusters affects the shape of the stellar mass function (MF) in these clusters, because the escape probability of a star depends on its mass. The objective of this paper is to provide and…
We investigate the evolution, following gas dispersal, of a star cluster produced from a hydrodynamical calculation. We find that when the gas, initially comprising 60% of the mass, is removed, the system settles into a bound cluster…
Open star clusters are dynamic systems whose evolution is critically influenced by initial conditions such as star formation efficiency and orbital parameters. Understanding their dissolution mechanisms provides insight into stellar…
In 1958 Jan Oort remarked that the lack of old clusters in the solar neighborhood (SN) implies that clusters are destroyed on a timescale of less than a Gyr. This is much shorter than the predicted dissolution time of clusters due to…
We have studied the long-term evolution of star clusters of the solar neighborhood, starting from their birth in gaseous clumps until their complete dissolution in the Galactic tidal field. We have combined the "local-density-driven cluster…
The development and progress of the studies of winds and mass loss from hot stars, from about 1965 up to now, is discussed in a personal historical perspective. The present state of knowledge about stellar winds, based on papers presented…
We consider tidal masses and ages of Milky Way open clusters, as well as a simple model of their distribution. Our aim is to investigate the space of model parameters and the correspondence between modelled and observed two-dimensional…
We perform a series of simulations of evolving star clusters using AMUSE (the Astrophysical Multipurpose Software Environment), a new community-based multi-physics simulation package, and compare our results to existing work. These…
In previous papers of this series, we developed a new algorithm for modeling the formation of star clusters in galaxy formation simulations. Here we investigate how dissolution of bound star clusters affects the shape of the cluster mass…
We study the evolution of star clusters in the Galactic tidal field starting from their birth in molecular clumps. Our model clusters form according to the local-density-driven cluster formation model in which the stellar density profile is…
Aims: Based on our well-determined sample of open clusters in the all-sky catalogue ASCC-2.5 we derive new linear sizes of some 600 clusters, and investigate the effect of mass segregation of stars in open clusters. Methods: Using…