English

Does God play dice with star clusters?

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2023-12-14 v3 Solar and Stellar Astrophysics

Abstract

When a detailed model of a stellar population is unavailable, it is most common to assume that stellar masses are independently and identically distributed according to some distribution: the universal initial mass function (IMF). However, stellar masses resulting from causal, long-ranged physics cannot be truly random and independent, and the IMF may vary with environment. To compare stochastic sampling with a physical model, we run a suite of 100 STARFORGE radiation magnetohydrodynamics simulations of low-mass star cluster formation in 2000M2000M_\odot clouds that form 200\sim 200 stars each on average. The stacked IMF from the simulated clouds has a sharp truncation at 28M\sim 28 M_\odot, well below the typically-assumed maximum stellar mass Mup100150MM_{\rm up} \sim 100-150M_\odot and the total cluster mass. The sequence of star formation is not totally random: massive stars tend to start accreting sooner and finish later than the average star. However, final cluster properties such as maximum stellar mass and total luminosity have a similar amount of cloud-to-cloud scatter to random sampling. Therefore stochastic sampling does not generally model the stellar demographics of a star cluster as it is forming, but may describe the end result fairly well, if the correct IMF -- and its environment-dependent upper cutoff -- are known.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2307.00052,
  title  = {Does God play dice with star clusters?},
  author = {Michael Y. Grudić and Stella S. R. Offner and Dávid Guszejnov and Claude-André Faucher-Giguère and Philip F. Hopkins},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.00052},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

Accepted for publication in Open Journal of Astrophysics

R2 v1 2026-06-28T11:19:19.364Z