Related papers: Collisions in compact star clusters
We explore here an scenario for massive black hole formation driven by stellar collisions in galactic nuclei, proposing a new formation regime of global instability in nuclear stellar clusters triggered by runaway stellar collisions. Using…
Massive clusters are now seen to form easily in interacting and merging galaxies, making these excellent environments for studying the properties of young clusters. New observations of the Antennae (NGC 4038/39) show that the most luminous…
Young star clusters are often born with such high stellar densities that stellar collisions play an important role in their further evolution. In such environments the same star may participate in several tens to hundreds of collisions…
Recent images taken with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) of the interacting disk galaxies NGC 4038/4039 (the Antennae) reveal clusters of many dozens and possibly hundreds of young compact massive star clusters within projected regions…
Thousands of confirmed and candidate exoplanets have been identified in recent years. Consequently, theoretical research on the formation and dynamical evolution of planetary systems has seen a boost, and the processes of planet-planet…
Clusters are the dense inner regions of a wide-spread hierarchy of young stellar structures. They often reveal a continuation of this hierarchy inside of them, to smaller scales, when they are young, but orbital mixing eventually erases…
Young galaxies are clumpy, gas-rich, and highly turbulent. Star formation appears to occur by gravitational instabilities in galactic disks. The high dispersion makes the clumps massive and the disks thick. The star formation rate should be…
A massive young star cluster, initially embedded in its parent molecular cloud, will spiral into the Galactic Center from $\lta 30m_6^{1/2}\pc$ during the life-time of its most massive stars, if the combined total mass is $\sim…
The formation of compact objects like stars and black holes is strongly constrained by the requirement that nearly all of the initial angular momentum of the diffuse material from which they form must be removed or redistributed during the…
Runaway stellar collisions in dense star clusters are invoked to explain the presence of very massive stars or blue stragglers in the center of those systems. This process has also been explored for the first star clusters in the Universe…
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…
Recent observations have revealed a variety of young star clusters, including embedded systems, young massive clusters, and associations. We study the formation and dynamical evolution of these clusters using a combination of simulations…
The centers of most galaxies contain massive black holes surrounded by dense star clusters. The structure of these clusters determines the rate and properties of observable transient events, such as flares from tidally disrupted stars and…
Large numbers of young stars are formed in merging galaxies, such as the Antennae galaxies. Most of these stars are formed in compact star clusters (i.e., super star clusters), which have been the focus of a large number of studies.…
The supermassive black hole candidate at the Galactic Center is surrounded by a parsec-scale star cluster, which contains a number of early type stars. The presence of such stars has been called a "paradox of youth" as star formation in the…
Young massive stars in the central parsec of our Galaxy are best explained by star formation within at least one, and possibly two, massive self-gravitating gaseous discs. With help of numerical simulations, we here consider whether the…
Observations show the presence, in the halo of our Galaxy, of stars moving at velocities so high to require an acceleration mechanism involving the presence of a massive central black hole. Thus, in the frame of a galaxy hosting a…
Observations suggest that star formation occurs in only one or two crossing times for a range of scales spanning a factor of 1000. These observations include (1) measurements of embedded cluster ages in comparison with the cloud core…
The radii of young (<100 Myr) star clusters correlate only weakly with their masses. This shallow relation has been used to argue that impulsive tidal perturbations, or `shocks', by passing giant molecular clouds (GMCs) preferentially…
We carry out ray tracing through five high resolution simulations of a galaxy cluster to study how its ability to produce giant gravitationally lensed arcs is influenced by the collision cross-section of its dark matter. In three cases…