Related papers: Collisions in compact star clusters
In young star clusters, the density can be high enough and the velocity dispersion low enough for stars to collide and merge with a significant probability. This has been suggested as a possible way to build up the high-mass portion of the…
Close encounters and physical collisions between stars in young dense clusters may lead to the formation of very massive stars and black holes via runaway merging. We examine critically some details of this process, using N-body simulations…
The evolution of young compact star clusters is studied using N-body simulations in which both stellar evolution and physical collisions between stars are taken into account. The initial conditions are chosen to represent R136, a compact…
We study the occurrence of physical collisions between stars in young and compact star cluster. The calculations are performed on the GRAPE-4 with the starlab software environment which include the dynamical evolution and the nuclear…
Close encounters and physical collisions between stars in young dense clusters can result in new channels for stellar evolution, and may lead to the formation of very massive stars and black holes via runaway merging. We present some…
Close encounters between stars in star forming regions are important as they can perturb or destroy protoplanetary discs, young planetary systems, and stellar multiple systems. We simulate simple, viralised, equal-mass $N$-body star…
In this review, I present the case for how massive stars may form through stellar collisions. This mechanism requires very high stellar densities, up to 4 orders of magnitude higher than are observed in the cores of dense young clusters. In…
Young, massive star clusters are the most notable and significant end products of violent star-forming episodes triggered by galaxy collisions, mergers, and close encounters. Their contribution to the total luminosity induced by such…
We study the circumstances under which first collisions occur in young and dense star clusters. The initial conditions for our direct $N$-body simulations are chosen such that the clusters experience core collapse within a few million…
We use direct N-body simulations of gas embedded star clusters to study the importance of stellar collisions for the formation and mass accretion history of high-mass stars. Our clusters start in virial equilibrium as a mix of gas and…
Stars are most likely to merge or collide in regions of the highest stellar densities, and our own Galactic Center contains many stars packed into a relatively small volume -- even the ambient stellar number density in the central 50 pc is…
Using Monte Carlo codes, we follow the collisional evolution of clusters in a variety of scenarios. We consider the conditions under which a cluster of main sequence stars may undergo rapid core collapse due to mass segregation, thus…
Globular clusters were thought to be simple stellar populations, but recent photometric and spectroscopic evidence suggests that the clusters' early formation history was more complicated. In particular, clusters show star-to-star abundance…
When two stars collide and merge they form a new star that can stand out against the background population in a starcluster as a blue straggler. In so called collision runaways many stars can merge and may form a very massive star that…
When a binary star system is tidally disrupted by a supermassive black hole at a galactic nucleus, one star is ejected at a high speed while the other remains in a tightly bound orbit around the black hole. The cluster of tightly bound…
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 dynamical Monte Carlo simulations of dense star clusters near the Galactic center. These clusters sink toward the center of the Galaxy by dynamical friction. During their inspiral, they may undergo core collapse and…
Interacting galaxies often have complexes of hundreds of young stellar clusters of individual masses $\sim 10^{4-6}~M_\odot$ in regions that are a few hundred parsecs across. These cluster complexes interact dynamically, and their…
We review possible dynamical formation processes for central massive black holes in dense star clusters. We focus on the early dynamical evolution of young clusters containing a few thousand to a few million stars. One natural formation…
Centers of galaxies host both a supermassive black hole and a dense stellar cluster. Such an environment should lead to stellar collisions, possibly at very high velocities so that the total energy involved is of the same order as…