Related papers: Dynamical masses, time-scales, and evolution of st…
Dynamical evolution plays a key role in shaping the current properties of star clusters and star cluster systems. A detailed understanding of the effects of evolutionary processes is essential to be able to disentangle the properties which…
Globular clusters are stellar dynamical systems which evolve on stellar evolutionary and both internal and external dynamical timescales. Quantitative comparison of cluster properties with realistic evolutionary dynamical models is becoming…
The evolution of galaxies is driven strongly by dynamical processes including internal instabilities, tidal interactions and mergers. The cluster environment is a useful laboratory for studying these effects. I present recent results on…
Dynamical evolution of stellar mass distribution in star clusters is analysed by considering simultaneously the effects of dynamical friction, stochastic heating and the gravitational potential due to mass distribution in the clusters. A…
The evolution of star clusters is determined by several internal and external processes. Here we focus on two dominant internal effects, namely energy exchange between stars through close encounters (two-body relaxation) and mass-loss of…
Star clusters - open and globulars - experience dynamical evolution on time scales shorter than their age. Consequently, open and globular clusters provide us with unique dynamical laboratories for learning about two-body relaxation, mass…
This review concentrates almost entirely on globular star clusters. It emphasises the increasing realisation that few of the traditional problems of star cluster astronomy can be studied in isolation: the influence of the Galaxy affects…
Internal dynamical evolution can drive stellar systems into states of high central density. For many star clusters and galactic nuclei, the time scale on which this occurs is significantly less than the age of the universe. As a result,…
Globular star clusters that formed at the same cosmic time may have evolved rather differently from a dynamical point of view (because that evolution depends on the internal environment) through a variety of processes that tend…
Star clusters stand at the intersection of much of modern astrophysics: the interstellar medium, gravitational dynamics, stellar evolution, and cosmology. Here we review observations and theoretical models for the formation, evolution, and…
Some factors connecting the evolutionary histories of galaxies with the characteristics of their cluster systems are reviewed. Unanswered questions include: How is one to understand the observation that some globular cluster systems have…
Open and globular star clusters have served as benchmarks for the study of stellar evolution due to their supposed nature as simple stellar populations of the same age and metallicity. After a brief review of some of the pioneering work…
Globular clusters are among the most congested stellar systems in the Universe. Internal dynamical evolution drives them toward states of high central density, while simultaneously concentrating the most massive stars and binary systems in…
We review recent work that investigates the formation of stellar clusters, ranging in scale from globular clusters through open clusters to the small scale aggregates of stars observed in T associations. In all cases, recent advances in…
A qualitative study is made of the evolutionary tracks of various dense clusters, with allowance for the evaporation of stars, and for head-on collisions, until relativistic collapse occures or the cluster breaks up.
This paper addresses the questions of what we have learned about how and when dense star clusters form, and what studies of star clusters have revealed about galaxy formation and evolution. One important observation is that globular…
We present the results of a comprehensive analysis of the structure and kinematics of six Galactic globular clusters. By comparing the results of the most extensive photometric and kinematical surveys available to date with suited dynamical…
Dense star clusters expand until their sizes are limited by the tidal field of their host galaxy. During this expansion phase the member stars evolve and lose mass. We show that for clusters with short initial relaxation time scales (<~100…
We investigate the long-term dynamical evolution of two distinct stellar populations of low-mass stars in globular clusters in order to study whether the energy equipartition process can explain the high number of stars harbouring abundance…
Galactic globular clusters, which are ancient building blocks of our Galaxy, represent a very interesting family of stellar systems in which some fundamental dynamical processes have taken place on time scales shorter than the age of the…