Related papers: Dense Stellar Systems as Laboratories for Fundamen…
Three important developments are vastly increasing our understanding of the role of binaries in the dynamical evolution of globular clusters. From the observational side, the Hubble Space Telescope has shown us detailed pictures of the…
Although the basic physics of star formation is classical, numerical simulations have yielded essential insights into how stars form. They show that star formation is a highly nonuniform runaway process characterized by the emergence of…
Collisions of main sequence stars occur frequently in dense star clusters. In open and globular clusters, these collisions produce merger remnants that may be observed as blue stragglers. Detailed theoretical models of this process require…
Galactic globular clusters are ancient building blocks of our Galaxy. They represent a very interesting family of stellar systems in which some fundamental dynamical processes have been taking place for more than 10 Gyr, but on time scales…
Cosmological simulations of structure formation predict that galaxies are dramatically modified by galaxy harassment during the assembly of galaxy clusters, losing a substantial fraction of their stellar mass which today must be in the form…
We have developed a new simulation code aimed at studying the stellar dynamics of a galactic central star cluster surrounding a massive black hole. In order to include all the relevant physical ingredients (2-body relaxation, stellar mass…
We describe the public release of the Cluster Monte Carlo Code (CMC) a parallel, star-by-star $N$-body code for modeling dense star clusters. CMC treats collisional stellar dynamics using H\'enon's method, where the cumulative effect of…
Neutron stars are astrophysical laboratories of many extremes of physics. Their rich phenomenology provides insights into the state and composition of matter at densities which cannot be reached in terrestrial experiments. Since the core of…
(abridged) This thesis presents theoretical and statistical techniques broadly related to systems of dynamically-interacting particles composed of several different types of populations. They are applied to observations of dense star…
We study the dynamical evolution of globular clusters containing primordial binaries, including full single and binary stellar evolution using our Monte Carlo cluster evolution code updated with an adaptation of the single and binary…
Numerical simulations of star cluster formation have advanced greatly during the past decade, covering increasingly massive gas clouds while accounting for more and more complex physics. In this review, I discuss the present state of the…
Galactic globular clusters are not simple stellar populations. And nothing is simple in their study, basically because we try to reconstruct chains of events that occurred at redshift z > 2-3 by observing these objects at z=0, after a…
Astronomers have constructed models of globular clusters for over 100 years. These models mainly fall into two categories: (i) static models, such as King's model and its variants, and (ii) evolutionary models. Most attention has been given…
The fraction of stars in binary systems within star clusters is important for their evolution, but what proportion of binaries form by dynamical processes after initial stellar accretion remains unknown. In previous work, we showed that…
Dense stellar systems such as globular clusters and dense nuclear clusters are the breeding ground of sources of gravitational waves for the advanced detectors LIGO and Virgo. These systems deserve a close study to estimate rates and…
We introduce a new suite of simulations, "The Cloud Factory", which self-consistently forms molecular cloud complexes at high enough resolution to resolve internal substructure (up to 0.25 Msol in mass) all while including galactic-scale…
The evolution of dense star clusters is followed by direct high-accuracy N-body simulation. The problem is to first order a gravitational N-body problem, but stars evolve due to astrophysics and the more massive ones form black holes or…
Binarity among stellar clusters in galaxy is such a reality which has been realized for a long time, but still hides several questions and problems to be solved. Some of binary star clusters are formed by close encounter, but the others are…
This thesis embraces several aspects of theoretical stellar dynamics in clusters, both analytically and numerically. We try to elucidate the phenomena currently observed in all types of galaxies, including AGNs and quasars, some of the most…
Detailed models of galactic disk formation and evolution require knowledge about the initial conditions under which disk galaxies form, the boundary conditions that affect their secular evolution and the micro-physical processes that drive…