Related papers: The moment of core collapse in star clusters with …
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…
Improving our understanding of the earliest stages of star formation is crucial to gain insight into the origin of stellar masses, multiple systems, and protoplanetary disks. We discuss recent advances made in this area thanks to detailed…
In the context of the recently developed "equation-free" approach to computer-assisted analysis of complex systems, we extract the self-similar solution describing core collapse of a stellar system from numerical experiments. The technique…
The influence of rotation on the dynamical evolution of collisional stellar systems is investigated by solving the orbit-averaged Fokker-Planck equation in (E,J_z)-space. We find that large amounts of initial rotation drive the system into…
In many different galactic environments the cluster initial mass function (CIMF) is well described by a power-law with index -2. This implies a linear relation between the mass of the most massive cluster (M_max) and the number of clusters.…
The centres of galaxies host nuclear stellar clusters, supermassive black holes, or both. The origin of this dichotomy is still a mystery. Nuclear stellar clusters are the densest stellar system in the Universe, so they are ideal places for…
We present results from our numerical simulations of collapsing massive molecular cloud cores. These numerical calculations show that massive stars assemble quickly with mass accretion rates exceeding 10^-3 Msol/yr and confirm that the mass…
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…
Stars form predominantly in groups usually denoted as clusters or associations. The observed stellar groups display a broad spectrum of masses, sizes and other properties, so it is often assumed that there is no underlying structure in this…
We present the results of a series of numerical simulations of compressible, self-gravitating hydrodynamic turbulence of cluster-forming clumps in molecular clouds. We examine the role that turbulence has in the formation of gravitationally…
Young star clusters can inherit bulk rotation from the molecular clouds from which they have formed. This rotation can affect the long-term evolution of a star cluster and its constituent stellar populations. In this study, we aim to…
Upon their formation, dynamically cool (collapsing) star clusters will, within only a few million years, achieve stellar mass segregation for stars down to a few solar masses, simply because of gravitational two-body encounters. Since…
We present the first study of the dynamical evolution of an isolated star cluster that combines a significant population of primordial binaries with the presence of a central black hole. We use equal-mass direct N-body simulations, with N…
Accurate determinations of stellar mass functions and ages of stellar populations are crucial to much of astrophysics. We analyse the evolution of stellar mass functions of coeval main sequence stars including all relevant aspects of…
We investigate the evolution of young star clusters using N-body simulations. We confirm that subvirial and fractal-structured clusters will dynamically mass segregate on a short timescale (within 0.5 Myr). We adopt a modified…
The level of mass segregation in the core of globular clusters has been previously proposed as a potential indicator of the dynamical constituents of the system, such as presence of a significant population of stellar-mass black holes…
Understanding the processes that determine the stellar Initial Mass Function (IMF) is a critical unsolved problem, with profound implications for many areas of astrophysics. In molecular clouds, stars are formed in cores, gas condensations…
We review progress in numerical simulations of star cluster formation. These simulations involve the bottom-up assembly of clusters through hierarchical mergers, which produces a fractal stellar distribution at young (~0.5 Myr) ages. The…
Massive stars form in clusters within self-gravitating molecular clouds. The size scale of these clusters is sufficiently large that non-thermal, or turbulent, motions of the gas must be taken into account when considering their formation.…
This is a continuation of our study of open clusters based on the 2--Micron All Sky Survey photometry. Here we present the results of the mass function analysis for 599 known open clusters in the Milky Way. The main goal of this project is…