Related papers: Stellar Exotica produced from Stellar Encounters
Most planetary systems are formed within stellar clusters, and these environments can shape their properties. This paper considers scattering encounters between solar systems and passing cluster members, and calculates the corresponding…
Globular clusters are dense stellar systems that have typical ages of ~13 billion years, implying that they formed at redshifts of z>~6. Massive stars in newly formed or primordial globular clusters could have played an important role…
Observations and theoretical work suggest that globular clusters may be born with initially very large binary fractions. We present first results from our newly modified Monte-Carlo cluster evolution code, which treats binary interactions…
The formation of massive stars in close binary systems is complicated due to their high radiation pressure, the crowded environment and the expected minimum separation for fragmentation being many times greater than the orbital separation.…
We consider the origins of enigmatic stellar populations in four Local Group galactic nuclei, specifically the Milky Way, M31, M32 and M33. These are centrally concentrated blue stars, found in three out of the four nuclear star clusters…
Ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) with Lx > 10^{39} ergs/s have been discovered in great numbers in external galaxies with ROSAT, Chandra, and XMM. The central question regarding this important class of sources is whether they represent an…
The presence of a nearby companion alters the evolution of massive stars in binary systems, leading to phenomena such as stellar mergers, X-ray binaries and gamma-ray bursts. Unambiguous constraints on the fraction of massive stars affected…
Surveys of the binary populations in the solar neighbourhood have shown that the periods of G- and M-type stars are log-normally distributed. However, observations of young binary populations suggest a log-uniform distribution. Clearly some…
Two separated sequences of blue straggler stars (BSSs) have been revealed by Ferraro et al. (2009) in the color-magnitude diagram (CMD) of the Milky Way globular cluster M30. Their presence has been suggested to be related to the two BSS…
This chapter explores how we might use the observed {\em statistics} of blue stragglers in globular clusters to shed light on their formation. This means we will touch on topics also discussed elsewhere in this book, such as the discovery…
We have analyzed populations of blue straggler stars (BSSs) in 24 Magellanic Cloud star clusters using multi-passband Hubble Space Telescope images. We compiled a homogeneous BSS database, containing both traditional and evolved BSSs. We…
Globular Clusters (GCs) are known to host distinct stellar populations, characterized by different chemical compositions. Despite extensive research, the origin of these populations remains elusive. According to many formation scenarios,…
Recent surveys of the blue straggler (BS) population in the galactic globular cluster M3 (NGC 5272) give the first complete characterization of the number density of BSs as a function of radius over an entire globular cluster. The BSs in M3…
Characterization of the binary fractions in star clusters is of fundamental importance for many fields in astrophysics. Observations indicate that the majority of stars are found in binary systems, while most stars with masses greater than…
In the last years several exoplanets have been discovered that orbit one component of a compact binary system (separation < 50 astronomical units), the probably best-known case is gamma-Cephei. So far, all attempts to explain the in-situ…
The features and make up of the population of X-ray sources in Galactic star clusters reflect the properties of the underlying stellar environment. Cluster age, mass, stellar encounter rate, binary frequency, metallicity, and maybe other…
Optical and X-ray studies of six nearby galaxies show that the probability a globular cluster will be an X-ray source is consistent with being linearly proportional to its mass. We show that this result is consistent with some recent…
Millisecond pulsars (MSPs) are believed to be old neutron stars, formed via Type Ib/c core-collapse supernovae, which have subsequently been spun up to high rotation rates via accretion from a companion star in a highly circularised…
We postulate that most stars are born in aggregates of binary systems which are dynamically equivalent to the `dominant mode cluster'. The initial binary orbits are consitent with pre-main sequence data. Stellar masses are paired at random…
A number of scenarios for the formation of multiple populations in globular clusters (GCs) predict that second generation (2G) stars form in a compact and dense subsystem embedded in a more extended first-generation (1G) system. If these…